Top 5 Best Apps For Book Lovers: Millions of Books for Free!

Covid-19 has breached many of us around the world to a sense of yearning for new ways to entertain ourselves at home. This could mean finding new hobbies or reinvesting our time into old ones. In this blog, you will be able to discover 5 different amazing apps that can help you rekindle your love for books and all the magic every story has. So hold on tight because these top 5 apps are yours, Book Lovers!

1. Goodreads 

Goodreads is the number 1 app for all book worms! Ranking at number 1 this platform provides plenty of opportunities to find the right book for you from over a billion books! With an infinite amount of searches for recommendations, author collections, and popular quotes, you will be able to find the right book for you just like the 40 million users on this app!

Platform Availability: Browser, Android, and iOS

Price for Subscription: Absolutely free!

2. Amazon Kindle 

Amazon Kindle has many exclusive features such as a page flip navigation feature where one is able to view the book and bookmark it from a birds-eye view. In addition, this app includes many convenient features while reading; highlighting text, translation/meaning of words, dictionaries, change size and font of text, and size of the page. Amazon Kindle helps you with all of your favorite books with the most comfort in a single touch. 

Platform Availability: Android, iOS, Blackberry, and Windows

Price for Subscription: Available on Amazon Account (book prices may vary)

3. Wattpad

Wattpad is where your talent can shine! On this platform, you will be able to story tell and read to your friends, show your talented writing skills, and make friends from all over the world! Great for iPhone users who are always on the go and love to read!

Platform Availability: Web, Android, and iOS

Price for Subscription: Absolutely free!

4. Amazon Audible 

Amazon Audible is one of the top choices for those who love to hear others read to them. On Amazon Audible you will be able to hear authors read the book to you alternatively. This is great for young kids who love to go to bed hearing a book or even working adults who love to hear stories while multitasking. This app is highly compatible with smartphones, iPads/tablets, and any Amazon product. 

Platform Availability: Android, iOS, Windows phone, Amazon kindle, and Fire TV

Price for Subscription: Absolutely free 30 Day Trial to download (1) audiobook with an addition of $14.95 a month

5. Epic!

All the Epic stories you are about to hear with this app! This app is great for children under the age of 12 and love to spend their spare time reading. With the addition of new books and old, this app is great to find some of your favorite childhood stories. The age-based library of books on this app helps children learn in different languages, in video or audio format.

Platform Availability: Android and iOS

Price for Subscription: Free for all educators or $7.99 a month 

For additional information on apps or if you would like to build your own, please feel free to reach out to us!

6 Benefits of MVP Product Development

You must be thinking, MVP? I thought that was just a term for the most valuable player in sports. This is true, however MVP meaning Minimum Viable Product began when one man couldn’t find a pair of shoes he was looking for in the store, so his solution was online shopping. MVP was born in 1990.

Instead of investigating the market, he dove right in and created a website from scratch. His approach to an online store was looking at a shoe store, clicking on the images of shoes then posting them on his site. When he received an order, he would purchase the shoes from the one website and then ship them.

There’s no doubt that he lost a lot of money on each sale, but regardless it was a method to test a business idea. Once he had inquired that customers were actually interested in purchasing shoes online, he turned it into a fully functional legal business.

Nick Swinmurn is the master behind the company Zappos, it was eventually attained by Amazon for $1.2 Billion.

The approach to create Zappos, by Swinmurn, is known today as MVP Development.

Now, what is the MVP Development process?

Minimum Viable Product, otherwise known in short as MVP, means that the smallest product, with the least features, just includes the basics and those functions that demonstrate your product.

Within mobile app development, MVP is a basic interpretation of a mobile application. MVP is the action of creating a new product with base function and important minimal features to test how the main audience will respond. Once that’s developed the full version of the product will take place.

MVP assists with testing, designing, and delivering the final product. MVP development holds a crucial task of web development and designing. A countless number of businesses have run into major drawbacks when trying to launch a Minimum Viable Product for mobile app or web.  This is why it is crucial to understand the question: How to develop a minimum viable product?

But, what’s the purpose of an MVP?

The purpose of creating an MVP is to release a product in an efficient time frame, that is based on your idea with a limited budget. This method enables the business owner to collect users’ feedback for the main product and include it in future iterations. Using MVP will help you find the right audience while looking for ideas that are only based on experience which saves time.

Creating an MVP means ensuring you have a balance between what you’re offering and what your customers actually need. An MVP also helps minimize the number of errors that may occur.

Here are the top Benefits of MVP Product Development

1. Focus on Building the Core

Using an MVP directs the attention onto one idea. The concept that MVP belongs to is similar to a lean start-up, such that you can build a product with a limited budget in a specific time frame. There are some tasks that could be higher priority, but with having limited features it can reduce the time and cost.

2. Early Testing Opportunity

This provides us the chance to investigate if an idea will work from step one, without having to invest your entire budget to testing.

3. User Intelligence and Gathering Feedback

The MVP provides you with the opportunity to get the prospective users’ opinions on how they want to see the final product.

4. Allows Market Validation

Utilizing an MVP helps you develop an understanding of if your app is in the correct target market. It should be able to demonstrate your brand well to the users, and allow them to visualize how unique your product is, in comparison to others on the market.

5. Takes Less Time to Develop your App

Having the ability to develop an app efficiently in less time than previously means lower development costs. As well, the quicker your app can be launched the faster there will be feedback.

6. Budget Friendly

Another crucial advantage to using MVP, as it minimizes spending all of the resources immediately, especially on components that may or may not work.  

Surprisingly enough, but very few apps were actually downloaded out of all that are available on iOS and Android, and this is because of problems with the user interface or overall poor performance.

It is recommended to create an MVP as it is an efficient method to boost your mobile development strategy.

If you’ve launched a new product or business, it’s more than likely you’ve thought about the amount of time invested through the initial idea approval. If the answer is yes, then the MVP development process is the perfect solution for your idea.

Stats Emphasizing the Need to Build an MVP

• 29% of start-ups fail due to running out of cash

• Start-ups that scale properly will grow 20x faster than those that scale prematurely

These stats precisely demonstrate the requirement to create an MVP, however, here are the more specific reasons to build a Minimum Viable Product.

• Creating an initial model

• Conducting initial idea approval

• Preparing to start your journey

The whole concept of building a mobile app has been broken into two major sections:

Business and Marketing, because of the MVP you’ll have the ability to create a survey to gather feedback for the best approaches. The surveys will also improve the advertising platforms.

Proof of Concept, the technical aspect. With an MVP you’ll be able to efficiently execute the crucial programming and designing the minimum features, which will eventually make your app unique.

Now, How Do You Build a Minimum Viable Product?

1. Start with Market Research

Understand the market you are getting yourself into, before you initiate an idea and start the MVP process. A good way to gather market research is to conduct many surveys. The more the merrier, or in this case the more you have the better chance of success.

2. Ideate on Value Addition

Ask yourself: What value does your product offer to its users? How can it be beneficial? and Why would they purchase your product?

These questions will help you get a clear understanding of the mandatory predictions of your product. MVP encourages you to introduce the value to consumers when it’s just an idea, because it will help create a better MVP.

3. Plan out the User Flow

This is the Design Process stage, and it is very important. This stage is crucial to make sure that your app is convenient, while also designing it around the consumer’s perspective.

User flow is also a crucial aspect when designing because it ensures that you won’t leave anything important out.

4. Prioritize the MVP features 

It’s inevitable, but it is important to ensure all the MVP features are included, since this is an MVP.

5. Launch the MVP

Once you’ve established the main features and have knowledge on the market needs, you can develop your MVP. You need to understand that the MVP is not a lower quality to the final product, it still needs to satisfy your customer’s needs. 

6. Exercise and Utilize – Build, Measure, Learn

Everything is a part of a process: define the scope of work, work with the product in the development stage, and then quality assurance. 

Review the feedback after the product has launched so you know how to grow and do better on future products.

5 Developer Mistakes to Avoid When Building an MVP

1. Solving the wrong problem

Before getting started on an idea you need to make sure that your product is worth it or not and it won’t waste time or resources.

You can ask yourself: Who is this for? What problem do I want to solve? Is my proposal an effective solution to the problem?

If your goal is to target every market, there’s a chance you won’t get anywhere. Once you’ve established the correct audience, the second question should have an excellent solution and the third a confirmed yes.

2. Bypassing the prototype phase

Think of if you submit an assignment without proofreading it, then get it back and have a bunch of grammar mistakes.

If you launch an MVP without testing it, more likely than not the feedback is going to come back with several flagged problems.

Learn your lesson and don’t bypass the prototype phase, you’ll thank yourself later.

3. Targeting the wrong segment group

Once you have a ready MVP prototype, it’s time to go test it out and gather feedback from your chosen target audience.

This is the stage where you could learn if you chose the right audience, or if you’ve made a mistake and need to make adjustments. Don’t ask relatives because their feedback could be biased, or just provide you the wrong feedback.

4. Wrong development method

If you dive right into the process of MVP development without knowing the right method, that’s calling for a lot of mistakes. This is one of the reasons why start-ups will start giving up in the middle, because they rush into things even if it’s wrong.

5. Confusion between qualitative and quantitative feedback

Qualitative Feedback provides you with feedback that corresponds with the user-friendliness of features in the product or service. It is a direct assessment of usability, that helps developers to analyze specific problems that may arise.

Quantitative Feedback provides the metrics that point out whether a task was easy or difficult to pursue. It is an indirect approach to the usability of the design.

Top tips for how to target the correct market when building an MVP

1. Analyze the competition

2. Geographically map out the customer base

3. Find new motivation behind a purchase

How to measure the success of your MVP

1. Word of Mouth

2. Engagement

3. Sign-up

4. Thorough Client Appraisals from the feedback

5. Percentage of active users

6. Client acquisition cost

7. Number of paying users

8. Client Lifetime value

9. Churn Rate

4 tips for the transition between Minimum Viable Product to Full Scale

1. Gather Feedback

2. Prepare to scale

3. Perfect your pricing

4. Don’t shy away from marketing

Wow, that was a lot of information to consume, but now you are ready to endure a journey of your first MVP development. A key to remember is that you don’t need to be perfect, and if you have any questions, reach out to one of our experts at ISU Corp!

8 Vital Tips to Create Potent SharePoint Team Sites

A SharePoint Team Site helps you to share your thoughts, opinions, and ideas with team members. You can also exchange and synchronize content and information, find insights, and work in a more collaborative way. The platform is quite popular mainly because of its versatility. The numbers speak for themselves as 200,000 organizations use SharePoint worldwide for content management.

In this article we’ll help you incorporate SharePoint in your organization and build productive SharePoint Team Pages, but also ensure that you earn the full ROI on your investment in SharePoint. Here are 8 tips on how to build an effective SharePoint Team Site, based on our experiences.

Tip 1: Construct Your SharePoint Team Site

Think about what your top-level sub-sites are and how you’re going to organize the second and third-level sites as you begin to draft your SharePoint Team Site content and material. Navigation to all the key containers with a basic, clear hierarchy should be included on your homepage, so you can find your information and details faster.

You’d be surprised that a lot of users depend entirely on the smart search feature while choosing to ignore the structure. Although this is a fantastic feature, the end users will often not know which keywords to use to locate the documents they are searching for. They will, however, have a general idea of which libraries to navigate through to find the documents. A structured framework can be very beneficial and significant in increasing the efficiency and productivity of your team.

Tip 2: Modify Your Site Navigation

To customize your site's navigation, you can add, delete, or edit the links on the top navigation bar or the fast launch bar (on the left-hand side, see the image below). This makes it easier for users to find their way around your site. "Click one of the "EDIT LINKS’ options on the homepage of the team site to get started.

If for whatever reason you do not see a "Delete LINKS" option on the homepage of your team, you may not be able to make changes, or your admin may have customized the site to not include the "EDIT LINKS" option on the homepage of the team site. Before you can configure your team site, you need to be a site owner or be granted permission.

Tip 3: Keep in Mind Cross-Device Usability

The fact that your team can access the content from any computer or device at any time is another admired advantage of using a SharePoint Team Site. All that is required is an internet connection. However you need to configure your SharePoint Team Site to be cross-device compatible to ensure that your SharePoint Team Site can be conveniently accessed on all different platforms. Here are a handful of tips:

Sometimes if the top navigation bar and quick launch bar are too long, they won't show on the device being used. Make sure to keep it short and sweet.

To style your content to various devices make sure your SharePoint Team Site uses device channels (part of the SharePoint publishing infrastructure).

Tip 4: On your Homepage Incorporate the Most Frequently Updated Pages

Consider this, what would you like to see on the landing page if you were using a team site for the first time? Would you be able to easily find the content you need if you were a new employee at your organization? Think of the pages that are updated most often and draw more end users. When developing your SharePoint Team Site it’s important to ponder about these things. Good examples include news sites, promotions, corporate activities, job openings, surveys, etc. Display these pages on your homepage with web parts.

Tip 5: Visuals

Simply using text is good and all, however images communicate more effectively. Visuals can offer an exciting look and feel on the homepage of your SharePoint Team Site and can increase the usage rate. In order to improve user engagement, a simple slideshow with pictures of your team is a good element.

Tip 6: Include an Introduction and Guidance

One of the most important things that many users forget to include is a welcoming message at the top of the homepage with a quick introduction to the portal. We recommend including tips like: how to use the SharePoint Team Site. At the end of the introduction, be sure to add a link to an instruction manual that your end users can download. This will serve as a self-training document when your team site is launched and when new hires join your team.

A welcome message on the top of the homepage with a short introduction to the portal is one of the most important items that many users fail to include. Tips such as how to use the SharePoint Team Site, how to keep libraries coordinated, and how to tag. Add a link to comprehensive instructions at the end of the introduction that can be accessed by your end users. When your team site is launched and when new hires join your team, this will serve as self-training content.

Tip 7: Organize Your SharePoint Team Site by Using a Flat Structure

The grouping of your data by metadata rather than files is one of the things you can do with your SharePoint Team Sites. This is referred to as a "flat structure" and relies on marking the content in a particular way. In previous years, this "flat structure with marking" has been commonly used. The three main advantages of a flat structure implementation are:

When you're trying to find the content you need most, you don't have to dig through several layers of folders.

When you use a flat structure approach, you do not need to worry about mistakenly saving content in the wrong folder.

The length of your URL is kept short. There’s a 400-character maximum limit, each folder adds to the length of the URL

If you're going for a flat structure, make sure to correctly plan end-user training and education on how to properly tag your content. One of the downsides of the flat structure is that when you search using common keywords, the search results can be overwhelming. If your end users incorrectly tag your content, it will take longer to locate the correct information/documents and may even lead to loss of information. That is why proper planning and training/education for end-users is a vital part of using your SharePoint team site's flat structure.

Tip 8: Make Changes & Be Flexible

SharePoint is a customizable platform that you can tailor to fit your needs. Have a pilot phase when you first design your SharePoint Team Site, where you can see how it is used by your end users. Be sure to get input from your end users during the pilot period and then make the requisite adjustments to make it your very own team site that meets the needs of your team.

When your team uses your SharePoint Team Site, you will discover expectations and preferences from them that the Team Site does not quite satisfy. SharePoint is a very flexible platform that is highly customizable. This can be used to create an entirely personalized app and platform to suit the distinct needs of your company.

Interested in learning more? Contact us today!