Bookie
Overview
Bookie is a mobile management app designed for independent bookstore owners and staff. Small bookstores often run on a patchwork of generic tools, for example, Square for checkout, Excel for inventory, and Google Calendar for events, leaving owners without a unified view of their store. Bookie centralizes inventory, sales analytics, customer insights, and event planning into a single bookstore-specific platform. As part of a four-person team, I designed the information architecture and wireframes for the app. For this case study, I revisited the high-fidelity design to refine the visual system and explore additional product improvements.
Information Architecture
Running an independent bookstore involves many parallel streams of work, from daily operations to long-term planning. We identified four core modules to anchor the app: Inventory Management, Sales Dashboard, Customer Insights, and Event Management. From there, I developed the full information architecture by defining the navigation structure, mapping the relationships between modules, and breaking each module down into its constituent pages and sub-flows.
Wireframe
The app is anchored by a Dashboard that gives users a quick read on the store's daily state, automatically aggregating key signals from each of the four modules.
Two Navigation Paths
Two paths support different use cases: Dashboard cards open module summaries for quick review, while the side Menu opens full module pages for hands-on operations.
Four Modules
- Inventory Management - Instead of sorting inventory alphabetically or by category, I organized the page around stock status, with In Stock, Low Stock, and No Stock prioritized at the top so urgent restocking decisions surface first.
- Sales Dashboard - I structured the Sales page from overview to detail, opening with a Top-Selling Category snapshot before drilling into time, format, and payment breakdowns.
- Customer Insights - Customer insights are presented through four concrete dimensions: Customer Type, Purchase Frequency, Average Spend, and Customer Feedback. The first three quantify behavior; Customer Feedback adds qualitative context through tagged customer reviews.
- Event Management - Event Management covers three stages: planning through Event Type and Calendar, tracking attendance through Audience Info, and reviewing results through Post-Event Insights and Sales Impact.
Outcome
The hi-fi design shown here was independently rebuilt for this case study, building on the team's style guide and original wireframes. The rebuild was initially prompted by the need to replace original typefaces that were no longer accessible, but expanded into a broader refinement of the visual system. During prototyping, I also noticed the Dashboard's top-right avatar and bottom-right Account tab both led to the same Profile page. Since the avatar carries the user's profile photo and connects to the photo-edit option in Account, removing it would weaken that link. Instead, I reassigned the avatar to open a Pending Tasks overlay surfacing items that need the user's attention.
Hi-fi Walkthrough
The walkthrough below brings the wireframe logic to life in hi-fi, completing each module's flow from end to end.
Reflection
Looking back, the foundation our team built was pretty solid. The style guide, content organization, and four-module structure all carried into the rebuild without needing changes, which let me focus on refinement instead of rework.
One thing I kept thinking about during the rebuild is how the app's descriptive text should be created: the short summaries, status notes, and prompts shown throughout the app. I'm not sure whether they should be auto-generated from data or written by store staff. The answer probably depends on what "useful and efficient" actually looks like for owners and staff day to day, which is something I'd want to learn from spending time in actual bookstores.