Maktaba Books – Testing update

In my previous post, I shared that Maktaba Book’s Beta version was ready for testing.

I was soo wrong about it. Only the borrowing automation was ready. I still needed to have a proper book catalogue with pictures and summaries, guide on how the new process works (for both borrowers and book owners), onboard the book owners, and plan out how to do the actual testing.

For the book catalogue, it took me about a week to finish. With the help of my girlfriend, I managed to update the images and summaries at a rate of 50 books a day. It now looks like proper digital library, you can check it out here if you want.

Creating a guide for the book owners and borrowers was tough. Explaining what they need to do step by step in a way that’s is very easy to comprehend took us a few revisions to get it right because we knew that we should spend more time here to avoid bigger headaches down the road.

You can have a look the book owner guide and the borrower guide.

After setting up the idiot-proof guide, we then proceeded to work on getting book owners onboard our Telegram process. This required a lot of cross platform communication. We had to ask their Telegram contact details on Instagram messaging and once we had the Telegram details and for some reason they don’t reply to us, we would message them on Instagram.

Last part was to actually plan out what we wanted to do for testing. After some discussion, we agreed to have it tested by ourselves (the team), our friends, and the existing Maktaba Books power users. That would total up to 10 users.

For the testing we wanted to get feedback on the borrowing process, and after returning the book. So we know exactly annoys/makes it difficult for users. To collect feedback, we created a Google Form to capture it, where it’s a mix of qualitative and quantitative questions. And in any situation we are interested to hear more about their feedback, we would actually have a call with them to dig.

So yeah, now we’ve been officially testing since 13 September. The next step is to go through the feedback, apply it and launch it fully.