The spark
For me, Marcel Proust is like that friend you sit and chat with for hours, getting pulled into whatever story they're telling. That's the feeling I wanted the app to protect. It's not a study guide, and not a summary tool. It's something that keeps you in the conversation with the book rather than pulling you out of it to go look something up.
The problem
Reading Proust is intimidating. In Search of Lost Time is seven volumes, has hundreds of characters, and a narrative style built on memory rather than plot. For readers with learning difficulties in particular, the barrier is the cognitive load of holding that much structure in your head while also just trying to enjoy the sentences.
Existing tools don't solve this well:
Wikipedia / character wikis: comprehensive, but spoil everything at once. You can't ask "who is this person" without learning who they become in volume six.
Study guides / CliffsNotes-style tools: built for exam prep, not for casual reading.
Generic AI chatbots: can answer questions about the book, but have no concept of where the reader currently is, so every answer risks spoiling what's ahead.
StoryGraph / Goodreads: general-purpose reading trackers.
Research
To ground the problem in real reader behaviour rather than assumption, I turned to r/Proust — a small but active community of people actively reading or re-reading In Search of Lost Time.
Reddit isn't a clean research source: the signal is scattered between unrelated discussion threads, and it isn't statistically representative of all readers. However, treated as evidence of need rather than data, it was valuable in two ways — it surfaced recurring questions, and several of those questions were ones I'd had myself while reading, which helped me trust the pattern rather than over-analyze on a handful of posts.
Recurring questions included:
"How do I start reading Proust?"
"Should I read one volume at a time?"
"Which translation is best?"
"Can someone explain this passage?"
"Who is… ?"
I translated these into user stories:
As a first-time Proust reader, I want a guided reading path so that I don't feel overwhelmed.
As a returning reader, I want annotations and historical context so I can understand social references without leaving the book.
As a member of a reading community, I want discussion prompts after each chapter so I can compare interpretations.
Persona: Tom, 26
Tom finishes what he starts, but Proust challenges him differently — not from lack of interest, but because his working memory fills up fast when he has to hold hundreds of characters in mind across seven volumes, especially with days-long gaps between reading sessions. He's tried StoryGraph and Goodreads, but neither was built with a book this demanding in mind. He doesn't want a summary or a shortcut — he wants a tool dedicated to this specific book, one that knows where he is in the story, helps him hold onto the cast without spoiling what's ahead, and doesn't make him feel like he's failing a book just because he lost the thread over a two-week gap.
The insight
What doesn't exist is an app that helps you experience Proust in a modern way without breaking the experience of reading it. The gap is information delivered at the right time, in the right amount, respecting where the reader actually is in the story.
The solution
Marcel is a reading companion that acts less like a reference tool and more like a well-read friend sitting next to you — one who knows the whole book, but only tells you what you're ready to hear.
Core features:
Spoiler-controlled chat: Ask "Who is Madame Verdurin?" and Marcel answers based only on what's been revealed up to your current point in the book. This is the core UX twist: it turns a generic Q&A bot into something that respects narrative pacing, the same way a real friend wouldn't spoil the ending of a story they're telling you.
Interactive character and place maps: Visual, relationship-based maps of characters and locations, with timelines that track how they evolve across the seven volumes. Characters unlock as you encounter them, so the map grows alongside your reading instead of overwhelming you with the full cast on day one.
"Where am I" recovery flow: A gentle, in-voice way to reorient when you've lost the thread — a real and common experience with Proust. Instead of a cold search bar, Marcel prompts you to recall the last thing you remember, using recognition-based options rather than asking you to recall details cold.
Walking through it
Here's what that looks like in practice, following Tom through his first reading session.
Tom just started reading Swann's Way. He has trouble remembering character names and relationships as he reads — the trigger for this whole journey is simple: he wants to keep reading the book.
HomeDoes: Opens app - checks progress - continues readingFeels: CuriousOpportunity: Progress bar + "Currently Reading" remove the "where was I" decision entirely — zero effort, instant context.
Read for…Does: Sets a 15-minute reading timerFeels: Relaxed, ready to commitOpportunity: Removes the daily "how long should I read?" decision before the habit even starts.
MapDoes: Opens character map to orient himselfFeels: Motivated / ConfusedPain point: Some characters are locked with no explanation whyOpportunity: A lock icon + tooltip ("Unlocks at Chapter 3") turns confusion into anticipation.
Ask → ReturnDoes: Asks "Who is Giotto?" - gets answer - returns to readingFeels: Confused → Relieved → SatisfiedPain point: The confusion is from the book, not the app - but Ask needs to be reachable mid-read, not buried in navOpportunity: Surface "Ask" contextually from the reading screen itself, catching the question the moment it forms.
Iteration: heuristic evaluation
Once the lo-fi wireframe existed, I ran it against Nielsen's usability heuristics to pressure-test the flows before moving further into visual design.
What held up well:
Match between system and the real world: Navigation uses plain language a reader would actually use (Read, Map, Ask) instead of technical labels, and "Currently Reading" mirrors how someone would naturally describe their own state, not a system one.
Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors: If a user doesn't remember where they left off, the chatbot responds in-voice instead of a cold error message. It reframes forgetting as normal — even Proust's narrator does it — rather than treating it as user failure.
Recognition rather than recall: The Ask feature lets readers reconstruct context through conversation instead of recalling plot details cold, and the character map reinforces this by showing relationships visually (mother, father, grandmother, connected by lines) rather than requiring readers to hold that structure in memory.
Aesthetic and minimalist design: Each screen has a single clear purpose (progress, reading state, character context, Q&A), with no competing actions crowding it.
What the evaluation surfaced as a real gap:
User control and freedom. There was no visible undo or redo, and "exit" had been replaced with the label "return" — which, on its own, removes a user's sense of control. This mattered less for destructive actions (misclicking doesn't lose data in a reading app) but mattered a great deal for navigation: if "return" is the only way back, users lose the baseline mental model of I can always get out of here. Compounding this, "return" appeared in inconsistent positions across screens — bottom-left on the Read screen, a top-left icon on the Ask screen — which also touches consistency and standards, since it asks users to learn a new convention instead of relying on one they already know from every other app.
The fix: standardize on a single, top-left back affordance (the most common convention across mobile apps) and keep it there on every screen, regardless of whether the label stays as "return" or reverts to something more familiar.
"Return" was tested against Nielsen's user-control heuristic and found to rely on a single, non-standard exit point. The fix adds a recognizable, consistently placed back affordance, restoring a fallback the user doesn't have to learn.
What this proved
Marcel started as a UX question and became a pacing question — and that shift is the one design decision that matters most here. Every feature (spoiler-controlled chat, character map, recovery flow) is really just an expression of the same rule: the right information, at the right time, without breaking the experience the reader came for. If this project proved anything, it's that protecting an experience can be just as much a design problem as solving one.
Visual direction
The visual language leans into Proust's era without becoming a costume — editorial warmth, not pastiche.
Typography: Yeseva One pairs with Lora for reading content, keeping a consistent editorial tone reminiscent of early-1900s print, while Inter handles UI elements, prioritizing clarity at small sizes where the reading experience can't afford friction.
Logo: A simple mark combining a book and a moustache — a small, specific nod to Proust himself, kept minimal enough to work at app-icon scale.
Accessibility: Color and type choices were tested for readability first — the era-appropriate aesthetic had to earn its place without compromising legibility, especially given the cognitive load already at play for readers.
Reflection & next steps
The Reddit research was the key unlock. It showed me the recurring pain points weren't really about comprehension (readers can handle Proust's prose) — they were about memory load: holding hundreds of characters across seven volumes in your head. That reframed the whole brief, from "explain Proust" to "protect the reader's flow state."
The heuristic evaluation was the most useful step in the process. It caught something I wouldn't have found by just looking at the wireframe: that "return" quietly broke a basic mental model (I can always get out of here) just by being inconsistently placed. It's a small fix, but it's the kind of thing that erodes trust in an app if left unchecked.
What I'd test next
Whether the character-unlock mechanic ever frustrates a reader who's already met someone but hasn't "unlocked" them yet — a pacing device could tip into a barrier if the trigger logic is too strict.
Real reading sessions with a small group of Proust readers, to see if the "Ask" flow actually gets used mid-read, in the moment confusion hits, rather than after the session ends.
Whether spoiler boundaries need to be more granular than "chapter" — some readers may want tighter control, especially around major reveals.
I'd want usage data on how often people reach for the character map versus Ask, to see which feature is actually doing the "don't lose the thread" job. That would tell me where to invest more design effort next.
