Design a Site to Help Students Save Hundreds on Their Textbooks

Bmore Books

Bmore Books provides students at Baltimore colleges and universities with an easier way to compare textbook prices and purchase textbooks. Students can enter their school and the name of a course, and get all textbook information for that course, along with price comparisons and purchase links.

http://www.wherecanibuytextbooks.com

mint.com
vimeo.com
http://xhtmlized.com/

All these sites capture the clean, Web 2.0 aesthetic we are looking for.

http://book.ly/

This competitor site offers similar functionality with many of the design elements we want, but uses a page-based metaphor.

Bmore books will not use a page-based metaphor for organization; all content will be displayed on a single homepage, which will be coded using Ajax and HTML5.

The site will allow students to search for classes at their school by name, get a list of textbooks for each class they select, and compare prices on those textbooks from three marketplaces (Amazon.com, Chegg.com and Barnes and Noble).

The page should emphasize simplicity. The flow through the page is as follows:

--Student arrives
--Student selects their school from a list of supported schools
--Student searches for a class by name (i.e. "Chemistry 101")
--A list of matches appears; student selects the correct class
--The class is added to a list of classes; students should be able to remove classes from this list, or add more classes by repeating the earlier steps
--All textbooks for the class are displayed, along with the textbook's title, a small image of the textbook, the price of the textbook on each of the marketplaces listed above, and a link to purchase the textbook on each of the markets

Selecting a school and searching for classes should be emphasized so that students arriving on the site are directed into the funnel of interactions listed above.

As much of the site as possible should be above the fold on a 1024x768 monitor. There is no logo for the site; please use the "Bmore Books" name in an appropriate typeface where you would ordinarily display a logo.

The overall design should have a clean, Web 2.0 feel. There should be minimal visual clutter. The website WhereCanIBuyTextbooks.com, listed above, displays some of the desired functionality, minus the school and class selection. You can see an example book lookup by entering the ISBN "9780878301478." Please do not draw heavily from this site for your designs, beyond getting a sense for the kind of data Bmore Books will display.

One possible layout direction is attached; please provide your own ideas as well.

Most visitors are college students in Baltimore Maryland, and will be visiting the site to choose books for the upcoming academic semester.