Project overview
The product
Follett's Destiny Discover is the search-and-discovery front end for K–12 school libraries, where students look up titles, check availability, and browse collections. Engage extends it from a catalog into a reading experience: it personalizes what a student sees, lets them set and share reading challenges, and rewards progress with badges and insights.
The brief
Design the Engage experiences for iPad, where students actually use the library, in Destiny Discover's established visual language. The work spanned a personalized home, an interest survey that tunes recommendations, and a reading-challenge flow built to feel social rather than assigned.
Make a school-library platform feel less like a database to query and more like a place a student wants to come back to, by personalizing it, making it social, and rewarding the act of reading.
My role
I was a UX designer at Photon, the digital product studio engaged by Follett, working on the Engage experiences for Destiny Discover. I designed the screen-level flows and interface for the personalized home, the interest survey, and the reading-challenge feature on iPad.
Like much of my later enterprise work, the craft here was designing inside an existing product: reusing Destiny Discover's components and visual language so new engagement features felt native, while introducing patterns the platform didn't have before: personalization, social challenges, and rewards.
A catalog gets students to a book, then no reason to keep reading
A discovery platform is great at answering "is this book in?", and not much else. It gets a student to the catalog, but nothing about it invites them to keep reading. The challenge was to add motivation without bolting on a separate app: the engagement had to live where students already were.
Generic, not personal
Every student saw the same catalog. Nothing learned what a reader actually liked or pointed them at their next book.
Solitary, not social
Reading was a private act with no shared momentum, no friendly competition, no reason to bring a friend along.
No sense of progress
Finishing a book led nowhere. There was no reward, no streak, no visible sign that a student was growing as a reader.
Three moves: a survey, a personalized home, a reading challenge
Three connected moves, each answering one of the gaps: an interest survey to personalize, a home that surfaces programs and rewards, and a reading challenge that makes finishing a book a social event.
An interest survey that tunes the whole experience
Before recommending anything, Engage asks. A grid of bold, illustrated subject tiles (Animals, Biology, Space, Adventure Fiction, Folklore) lets a student tap what they're into. It's deliberately visual and low-effort: big tap targets, friendly icons, no typing, designed for a kid on a tablet, not a form-filler.
Why it matters: a few taps turn a generic catalog into their shelf: recommendations, programs, and challenges all key off these interests.
A home that rewards coming back
The Engage home leads with a featured reading program, a big, inviting hero ("Dogs and Cats: Who is Loyal?") rather than a search box, then stacks the motivators below it: Insights into a student's reading, a wall of Badges they've earned, and a countdown to the next release. It reframes the library as something with news, rewards, and a reason to return.
Why it matters: progress becomes visible. Badges and insights give finishing a book a payoff, and the featured program always offers an obvious next thing to read.
Reading challenges that bring a friend along
From a normal search, say every horror title, a student builds a reading challenge right inside results. A side panel lets them add titles to the challenge and invite friends, so a private reading list becomes a shared, friendly competition. The catalog and the social layer live on one screen, no mode-switching, no separate app.
Why it matters: reading gets social momentum. Challenging a friend turns "I should read more" into a game with stakes and a finish line.
How much friction a young user simply won't push through
Designing for kids is designing for clarity
Big tap targets, illustrations over labels, no typing where a tap would do. The interest survey taught me how much friction a young user simply won't push through, and how far visual, low-effort interaction goes.
Motivation is a design material
Badges, challenges, insights, and countdowns only work when they support the real goal. Every reward encouraged students to read the next book.
Add to a product without fracturing it
Engage had to feel like Destiny Discover, not a bolt-on. Reusing its components and color while introducing new patterns is a discipline I'd carry into every enterprise project after.
An early lesson in scope honesty
This was early-career work focused on the interface, not the full research-to-impact arc. It's where I started learning that a good case study is honest about what it is, and what it isn't.
Engage added warmth to a practical library tool. Personalization, social challenges, and visible rewards gave students reasons to return because they wanted to read, not because they had to.