Once Upon a Shelf | Personal Project

I went to the ol' pen-and-paper method of mapping out the user journey. It was a challenge to think through all the major actions when someone approaches their bookcase, especially with the constraint of all of this being on a mobile app. And as someone who likes to gamify even the most mundane tasks, I thought about what it would look like to make this library app a little more fun and would incentivize me to read more books. So with my wireframes drawn out, I fed all this information into Claude Code.

The first draft was better than I expected but definitely needed a lot of polishing and clarifying. The biggest issue was that clickable elements would get cut off by modals or panels, or go off the screen. It took some iterating and putting in clarifying prompts, but I was able to get the results I wanted. I also needed fun names for the title of the app as well as for the various items in the game, so I turned to ChatGPT for those. Needless to say, I'm pretty sure I improved my fleet management skills by a lot through this project.

After being away from a "normal" 9-5 job for a year while I was volunteering at a non-profit in Korea, my greatest concern coming back was that I would feel utterly behind in anything related to AI. However, I had the privilege to join an exclusive, 2-day intensive AI workshop that basically taught us a year's worth of knowledge in those few days, and we all had a capstone project to show our skills by the end. And now, I need only a few hours to launch a ready-to-ship mobile app. I feel excited to see where my journey with AI will go, both in my day-to-day and professional life.