Next ChapterBehind the build.
Next Chapter is a University of Jordan graduation project that brings book search, reader ratings, reviews, and personal reading lists into one website. Readers can explore titles from Google Books, choose their favorite genres, and discover suggestions from the community.
Feb 2025 - Jun 2025 · University of Jordan
The supplied demo URL returned HTTP 404 when checked on 27 September 2026. The repository and case study remain available.
Based on the team’s original graduation report. Download it for the full requirements, diagrams, evaluation, and user manual.
See Next Chapter in action
The project
Next Chapter was built by a four-person University of Jordan team as a book discovery and review platform. The idea was to bring the browsing experience of a media catalogue to books, with search, book details, reader feedback, and personal collections in one place.
My contribution
The project schedule assigns me responsibility for defining the objectives, designing system functionality, and testing the system with users. I also shared interface design with Malek. Development and delivery were team efforts with Qusai, Malek, and Ahmad. These responsibilities are recorded in section 1.8 of the project report.
The problem and planning
The team wanted to make it easier for readers to choose a book and keep track of their reading. Planning compared Goodreads and LibraryThing and focused on connecting discovery, ratings, reviews, and lists through a consistent interface. The report includes stakeholder interview prompts with sample answers, questionnaires, functional requirements, wireframes, and system diagrams (chapters 2 to 4).
From sign-up to discovery
New readers create an account, select six genres, and can upload a profile photo or keep a default image. The home page uses these preferences to organize book browsing. Readers can search by title, author, or genre, open a book for more detail, and save it to a personal list. The documented onboarding and user manual show this flow in sections 4.5 and 6.5.
Reading lists and community feedback
Readers organize books into Favorites, Library, Open Cover, Closed Cover, and Dusty Shelves. Adding or removing a book updates the account records and the visible list state. Each book can show a Google Books rating alongside the community rating. Readers can submit or update their own rating and leave comments; the documented comment flow replaces filtered words with asterisks.
How recommendations work
Discovery uses the reader’s chosen genres and suggestions from other readers. The random suggestion feature queries books that have community ratings and comments, selects one, and shows its cover, rating, and a highlighted comment. An arrow loads another suggestion. This is a preference-based and community-driven flow; AI recommendations based on interaction history are listed as future work, not an implemented feature.
Design and implementation
The interface uses HTML, CSS, Bootstrap 5, and JavaScript, with Figma used for design. Blender and After Effects were used for animated page and hero transitions. PHP handles server-side validation, sessions, account functions, and database operations. JavaScript requests book data from Google Books. The team used Git and GitHub for collaboration (sections 3.1.1 and 5.1).
Data and API flow
Google Books supplies external book metadata. Search returns a list of matching titles with summary information; opening a title retrieves its full details. MySQL, hosted on Railway during the project, holds account information and the user-specific preferences, lists, ratings, and comments. Book and user identifiers connect these interactions. The report includes ER diagrams, sequence diagrams, and database screenshots in chapter 4.
Account management
The documented account flows cover sign-in, sign-out, profile changes, and email-based password reset. Sign-out clears the session, and password changes update the stored hash. Session-based access control and prepared database statements appear in the requirements. These are the report’s design and implementation descriptions, not an independent security assessment.
Testing and feedback
The team reports manual unit, integration, system, and end-to-end testing, plus Postman stress testing. Two usability experts reviewed the interface using Nielsen’s ten heuristics. Their findings included inconsistent button styling, missing tooltips, and insufficient guidance. Recommended changes were shared components, clearer validation, and contextual help. Cooperative evaluation covered registration, searching and saving books, and viewing reviews (chapter 6).
Reported results and limits
The cooperative evaluation records average task times of 30 seconds for registration and login, 2.5 minutes for searching and using the action buttons, and one minute for viewing interactions and reviews. The report does not state the participant count, so these figures describe that evaluation rather than a general benchmark. It reports desktop checks in Chrome, Firefox, and Edge and loading times below two seconds for major functions, without raw timing or load-test data. The original live demo is currently unavailable; the walkthrough, source code, and report preserve the project.
What comes next
The report identifies dependence on one book source and the absence of native mobile apps and AI recommendations as limitations. Proposed improvements include more Arabic book sources, recommendations based on reading behavior, Android and iOS apps with offline support, dark mode and accessibility settings, and friend profiles with messaging. These are future plans. The usability evaluation also gives a practical starting point: improve consistency, validation messages, and guidance before adding more features.