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MOLESKINE SMART NOTEBOOK

THE BRIEF

Moleskine is an Italian stationary brand known for its luxury notebooks. In 2016, they ventured into digital innovation by releasing the Smart Writing Set ($279), which allows users to create instant digital copies of anything they write in their notebook.

I teamed up with two other UX designers and was tasked with enhancing Smart Writing Set experience.

The ori
 

FORMAT:  FICTIONAL BRIEF

MY ROLE:  UX RESEARCHER

TEAM: 3 UX DESIGNERS

TIME:  3 WEEKS

HOW DOES THE SMART NOTEBOOK WORK?

Moleskine Breakdown.jpg

It looks just like a 
TRADITIONAL NOTEBOOK.
But the pages  feature Ncode
technology: a minuscule code printed onto the paper that tracks the exact location of a point within the page.

THE SMART PEN registers the data from the Smart Notebook, which is used to create digital copies of what has been written on the page.

the data is transferred to the MOBILE or TABLET APP, through which users can:​
 

  • edit their notes/sketches

  • transcribe their handwriting

  • share their pages to their email or drive

CREATING A RESEARCH PLAN

A key constraint: we had no access to the Smart Notebook​
This was a fictional brief for a school assignment, and a $279 Smart Notebook wasn't within our budget. This luxury price point also meant we might struggle to find actual users of the product within a limited research timeframe. 

How could we conduct user research without access to Smart Notebook users?
By identifying target users. We read through customer reviews, browsed through marketing materials, and analyzed the product's functionality. This narrowed our target users down to: writers, illustrators/designers, architects, and avid notetakers.

Setting clear objectives
We could still learn quite a bit from target users, but we decided to focus on user goals, needs, pain points, and behaviors around creating and sharing handwritten work. I then drafted a 3 part research plan comprised of:

USER INTERVIEWS

How do users create and share their work? What are their goals and needs here?

PRODUCT ASSESSMENT

What are the Smart Notebook's capabilities? How does it meet, or not meet, our users' needs?

COMPETITIVE
ANALYSIS

How do similar products solve for our users' needs? What can we learn from them?

UNDERSTANDING THE LANDScAPE:
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

VIEW FULL COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

Up first, we familiarized ourselves with our competitiors to broaden our perspective of what our product could accomplish. We wanted to ask: what is our product's unique value proposition? What are its weakenesses? Why might prospective users opt for one of our competitors over Moleskine? We looked at:

Rocketbook.jpeg

Up first, we familiarized ourselves with the landscape of competitive products to broaden our perspective of what our product could accomplish. We wanted to ask: what is our product's unique value proposition? What are its weakenesses? Why might prospective users opt for one of our competitors over Moleskine? We looked at:

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