WorldCat Find: Library Search on Mobile

• Beta launched on iOS App Store and Google Play Store in Q4 2022
• Full launch February 2023
• 4.4 star app store rating
• 5,000+ downloads as of August 2024
• Brought library search to mobile for 124,000+ active users

WorldCat is the largest online library catalog in the world, with over 540 million bibliographic records in 483 languages. It had a responsive website, but no native mobile app. Users searching for library materials on their phones were getting a scaled-down desktop experience, not a mobile-first one.

The organization needed a native iOS and Android app that gave users fast access to search, format filtering, library locations, and inter-library loan information. My job was to define the MVP scope and design every screen.

The team's baseline assumption was that most WorldCat users were librarians or institutional staff. Previous research from 2017 suggested this. That assumption was wrong.

This changed everything about how we prioritized features. We weren't designing for librarians managing catalogs. We were designing for researchers hunting down specific, often rare, materials across multiple libraries.

The 2017 research was outdated and built on incorrect assumptions about who our users were. I pushed for new user interviews, and I made a specific call that shaped the rest of the project: I convinced the product owner to demo the responsive website during those interviews instead of showing abstract concepts.

The product owner's original plan was to run standard interview scripts. My argument was that putting real UI in front of users would surface behaviors and pain points we'd never find through questions alone. We could watch people struggle in real time instead of asking them to remember past struggles.

It worked. The interviews revealed four key patterns:

This was my first senior role. I had the title and the responsibility, but I hadn't yet learned how to use the authority that comes with it.

The biggest problem: I let work get siloed. Tasks were assigned and completed in isolation. When I had questions about how a current task would impact previous or future work, I let those questions get tabled instead of insisting they be addressed.

The result was predictable. A later task would surface a dependency on something we'd already designed, and we'd have to go back and redesign it. Double work. Wasted time. Exactly the kind of thing a senior designer is supposed to prevent.

I also could have done a better job explaining to the team why working holistically (looking at the full flow, not just the current screen) leads to better results. I knew it intuitively but I didn't articulate it clearly enough to change how the team operated.

• Push harder for holistic design reviews instead of letting tasks stay siloed. The rework was avoidable.
• Exercise leadership authority earlier. Having the title means nothing if you don't use it to protect the team's time and the product's coherence.
• Advocate for post-launch analytics tracking. The app launched with a 4.4 star rating, but I don't have granular data on which features drove satisfaction or where users dropped off.
• Document the decision to use the responsive site as the MVP base more formally. It was the right call but it was made in conversation, not in a artifact the team could reference later.