She Started with a Book-Lending App. Research Led Her Somewhere Better.
Uraiba Zafar is a recent graduate of Pratt Institute's MS in Information Experience Design program and her Hack Your Summer project started with a very specific New York City problem: books take up a lot of space in a small apartment! She kept wishing there were an easier way to pass them along to friends instead of letting them sit unread on a shelf. That frustration became the seed for a book-lending platform.
But before designing anything, Uraiba's first move wasn't to start building. It was to write a PRD, or Product Requirements Document, with her assumptions stated plainly, put together a real research plan, and find out whether the problem she thought she was solving was actually the problem people had.
That research is what changed everything. And Uraiba said: "I'm really glad I did."
Over about a week, Uraiba gathered 41 survey responses, conducted 5 user interviews, and met with 3 mentors through Hack Your Summer. What she found surprised her. People rarely borrow books. When asked what they'd do first if they could see all their friends' books, only one person said they'd borrow one. Most said they'd look for recommendations. In fact, 83% of respondents said they trust friends most for book recommendations, more than any algorithm or review site. The behavior people actually wanted wasn't lending. It was knowing what the people they trust are reading.
How Uraiba Did the Research (and How You Can Too)
If you're at the planning stage of your own project and don't know where to begin with user research, remember that “research” doesn't need to be big or formal to be useful. Here's what worked for Uraiba:
Write down what you believe before you ask anyone. Uraiba wrote a short PRD with her assumptions stated plainly ("people want to lend books to friends"). That gave the research something to prove or disprove instead of just collecting opinions.
Ask about behavior, not the idea. She didn't ask "would you use a book lending app?" She asked how often people had lent or borrowed a book in the last year, how they found their last great read, and who they trust for recommendations. That's how the pivot surfaced: the data on lending behavior and the data on recommendations pointed in completely different directions.
Keep the survey short and go where your users already are. Uraiba’s survey was 14 questions, mostly multiple choice, with an optional email field at the end for anyone willing to do a follow-up interview. That one field is how she recruited interviewees. The best responses came from the two Brooklyn book clubs she's part of, people already gathered around the exact behavior she was studying. Forty-one responses in a few days. If a community for your users already exists, go there first.
Write an interview guide, then let people go off script. Her interviews ran 30 to 45 minutes and were organized by behavior, not by feature: how people discover books, what they own, whether they lend, how they talk about reading. Almost every question was "tell me about the last time you..." because people are bad at predicting what they'd do and good at remembering what they did. The two most useful moments were a ranking exercise (if an app could only do one thing well, which?) and a future-state question (if you could see every book your friends own, what would you do first?). Borrowing came last in both, every time.
Use your mentors as a research step. Uraiba connected with eight mentors through Hack Your Summer, and those conversations counted as much as the formal interviews. In your own work, this may be where connecting with a handful of experts could have an outsized impact.
Set a decision date and stick to it. She gave herself a week, then moved back from research mode to building. Research that doesn't end in a decision is just reading.
So, instead of focusing on lending, Uraiba’s project became a social reading platform centered on trusted recommendations and shared reading experiences, more intimate than Goodreads (which can feel like a public performance), more purposeful than a group chat, and more personal than any algorithm. Lending books didn't disappear from the product entirely (it's still there for the people who want to hand a book to a friend over coffee), but it's now one piece of a much larger social reading experience rather than the core premise.
One of the biggest friction points Uraiba wanted to solve through design was the tedium of manually cataloging a personal library, a first step that kills adoption before anyone gets to the good part. Her solution: an AI-powered bookshelf scanning experience where you point your camera at your physical shelf and it instantly builds a digital library. From there, users can organize their books, browse their friends' libraries, recommend titles, and start reading together.
Before you can browse your friends' shelves or get a recommendation from someone you trust, you need a shelf of your own. Lent With Love makes that part take about ten seconds: point your camera, and every book on your shelves is catalogued automatically.
Uraiba came into Hack Your Summer as a designer, not a developer. She left with a live app on TestFlight, a research methodology she can use on any future project, and a product that exists because she was willing to let her original idea be wrong.
Lent With Love is now live as a public beta on TestFlight.
You can try it here: https://testflight.apple.com/join/Tp9Fmszp.
