Blurb is a company that is passionate about bookmaking. With its desktop app BookSmart, anyone can create high quality, custom made books on par with ones sold in bookstores. While Blurb has built a loyal following among professional designers and photographers, they needed to attract a broader audience who may be less savvy, or don’t have a lot of time to craft books. What Blurb needed was an online app enables anyone to create a beautiful book in under 30 minutes.

One of the main barriers for our target audience, busy moms who wanted to make photo books but are limited on time, was uploading photos from various sources into the app. This was 2011 and it was still complicated to find and upload photos from Flickr or your PC. So it was important that we designed a streamlined, kiosk-like welcome experience that helps the user find photos quickly and easily.

Another barrier is being able to visualize the possibilities of what the book can look like. So we designed the app to be intuitive and adjusts to your needs. The user can play with different layouts, or have the app auto-layout the entire book for them. Photos rest in a tray on the bottom, ready to be dropped into pages, or to be moved or edited. Layouts adjust according to the user’s choices. A library of styles and patterns make it easy to customize the book. When the user is ready, a showroom-like Preview mode presents the user’s masterpiece proudly. 

The Bookify web application launched in 2011, and is still currently in use at Blurb.com. Our work won silver in the 2011 User Experience Awards.