DubsBooks: Reimagining the Textbook Purchasing Experience

Overview

Textbook purchasing at large public universities is broken. Students navigate a fragmented landscape of vendors, formats, and financial constraints—often without knowing what they need until days before class begins. DubsBooks is a proposed integrated platform that simplifies the process of finding, comparing, and obtaining course materials at the University of Washington.

The project was conducted as a capstone research sprint in UW's HCDE graduate program. Our goal was to move from problem identification through a testable high-fidelity prototype in ten weeks.

The Problem

For many UW students, the textbook purchasing experience begins with a moment of panic: it's the week before classes start, syllabi have just been posted (if at all), and they're scrambling to find and afford the right materials. This is a predictable, recurring failure with compounding effects—students who arrive without materials fall behind, and high prices push students toward piracy or simply going without.

Three tensions define the problem space:

• Information timing. Syllabi are released too close to the start of the quarter for students to plan purchases thoughtfully.
• Price opacity. Students spend significant time comparing prices across multiple platforms with no unified view.
• Financial friction. Aid deadlines, limited budgets, and confusing rental agreements add cognitive load at the worst possible time.

Research

We conducted 12 semi-structured interviews and 3 contextual inquiry sessions with UW undergraduates, focusing on their textbook purchasing behavior over the previous two quarters. Participants were recruited through HCDE participant pools and represented a mix of class standings, majors, and financial backgrounds.

Key interview domains:

• How and when students learn about required materials
• Their process for evaluating purchase options (format, vendor, price)
• Workarounds they've developed over time
• How financial aid affects purchasing decisions and timing

We also conducted a competitive analysis of six existing tools: Amazon, Chegg, ThriftBooks, the UW Bookstore's digital storefront, Libby (library ebooks), and the UW Libraries course reserves system.

Findings

Three themes emerged consistently across our interview and contextual inquiry data.

1. The Late Syllabus Problem

Ninety percent of participants reported receiving their syllabi within two weeks of the quarter starting, with many arriving during the first week of class itself. This compressed timeline creates artificial urgency and forces suboptimal decisions.

"I literally found out I needed a $180 textbook on the first day of class. I couldn't wait for Amazon to ship—I had to buy it from the bookstore at full price."

— Participant 4, Junior, Biology

2. The Price Research Burden

On average, participants reported spending 30–45 minutes per textbook comparing prices and formats across Amazon, Chegg, ThriftBooks, the UW Bookstore, and library resources. Many had developed informal personal systems—spreadsheets, browser tabs, screenshots—to track options across multiple sessions.

Students who used the UW Bookstore's website found it confusing to navigate and slow to load. The competitive analysis confirmed this: the Bookstore's tool lacked filtering by format, had no price comparison, and surfaced library availability only as an afterthought.

3. Financial Aid Friction

Students using financial aid for textbooks faced particular challenges. The UW Bookstore accepts financial aid but operates a narrow purchase window tied to disbursement schedules. Four of our twelve participants were either unaware of this constraint or had missed the deadline in a previous quarter—paying out-of-pocket for purchases they could have funded through aid.

Design Process

After synthesis, we developed a "How Might We" framework to structure ideation:

• HMW help students discover required materials earlier in the quarter cycle?
• HMW reduce the time and effort spent comparing prices and formats?
• HMW make financial aid utilization clearer and more timely?
• HMW support the informal peer lending that already happens between students?

We ran two design studio sessions with all four team members, generating 60+ concepts. After affinity mapping and impact/feasibility scoring, three concepts advanced to low-fidelity prototyping:

1. A browser extension that scans syllabus PDFs and auto-populates a materials list
2. A price comparison dashboard with side-by-side vendor comparison
3. An integrated financial aid tracker within the purchase flow

We tested lo-fi wireframes with 5 participants. The most significant finding: users didn't want three separate tools—they wanted a single place to manage the whole process. We merged all three concepts into one coherent product.

Solution

DubsBooks is a web application that integrates with UW's existing systems—Canvas, the Registrar, and the Bookstore's inventory—to provide a unified textbook management experience.

Syllabus Scanner

Faculty can optionally share their syllabi up to four weeks before the quarter begins—earlier than Canvas publishes them by default. Students who opt in get a head start: DubsBooks parses the syllabus, identifies required and recommended materials, and pre-populates their materials list.

Price Comparison Engine

A single view showing buy, rent, and digital options from the UW Bookstore, Amazon, Chegg, ThriftBooks, and the UW Library system. Options are filterable by format and delivery timeline. The interface makes the library option as prominent as paid alternatives—something no existing tool does.

Aid Dashboard

A real-time counter showing remaining financial aid balance and the number of days until the bookstore aid window closes. It appears at the top of the purchase flow for any student with aid on file—not buried in an account settings page.

Peer Lending Network

A lightweight matching system where students can list books they're willing to lend, borrow, or sell informally to other UW students. Listings expire at the end of the quarter. No money changes hands through the platform—it facilitates contact only.

Evaluation

We tested the high-fidelity Figma prototype with 8 UW undergraduates. Participants completed three core task scenarios:

1. Find and compare prices for all required textbooks for a given course. Average completion: 4.2 minutes, vs. a self-reported 38-minute baseline.
2. Apply financial aid to a purchase and identify the aid window deadline. 100% success rate, vs. a 60% baseline with the existing Bookstore interface.
3. Post a textbook for peer lending. 100% success rate; mean SUS score of 82 (above the "Good" threshold of 80).

Overall task completion rate: 85% across all scenarios. Qualitative feedback was strongly positive. The financial aid dashboard was cited by six of eight participants as the feature they'd most want to use immediately.

Reflections

The central lesson from this project is that systems-level constraints—when syllabi get published, how financial aid is administered—create downstream UX problems that no interface fix can fully solve on its own. DubsBooks works best paired with an institutional commitment to earlier syllabus publication. We advocated for this directly in our stakeholder presentation to iSchool and HCDE faculty.

The peer lending network, while enthusiastically received by participants, raised the hardest unresolved design questions: how do you prevent abuse? What happens if a borrowed book is damaged or not returned? These require a longer research phase and potentially legal review before any real implementation. We documented these open questions in a future work section of our final report.

If I were to continue this project, I'd focus next on the faculty-facing side of the syllabus scanner. Getting faculty buy-in—understanding their hesitations about publishing materials early, their concerns about course revisions—is the crux of whether the whole system is viable. That's an organizational design problem as much as a UX one.