Bibliotherapy-based book platform: research, UX strategy, and WordPress development

My role: Research, concept and UX design, information architecture, technical planning, and WordPress plugin development
Stack: WordPress (custom plugins, PHP), Elementor, WhatsApp ordering integration
Status: MVP core built; interactive features planned for Phase 2

The problem

Online bookstores sort books by topic (history, fiction, science). A person who is anxious, grieving, or burned out doesn’t search that way. They are looking for a book that will help with how they feel right now, and the usual catalog gives them no route to it.

The research I did at the start showed a second, wider gap. Bibliotherapy (the use of reading as a tool for healing) is well established in some places as a clinical field with university degrees, licensing, and controlled studies. In the Arab world it has mostly stayed inside library science and education. Research there tends to be descriptive, has little funding, has no professional licensing, and relies almost entirely on paper books. Arabic readers had no digital product that turned the idea into something they could actually use.

The client also had a practical limit. They wanted a simple, affordable MVP with no online payment system and no heavy dependencies.

Research and discovery

I started with the field itself. I did a comparative review of bibliotherapy traditions, covering their theoretical foundations, main institutions and authors, and research quality. I scored each on research volume, methodology, human resources, funding, and techniques. I also studied the Bibliotherapy Education Project (Central Michigan University) and took its three core mechanisms (identification, catharsis, and insight) as the psychological basis for how books would be chosen and grouped.

I then analyzed 10 reference platforms, some global (StoryGraph, Whichbook, and others) and some Arabic (Abjjad, Rufoof, Tiryaq). For each I noted which features to adopt and which user complaints to avoid. One example: StoryGraph users find its filtering too complex, so I made the filters in this project deliberately simple.

The solution: concept and UX

I designed the platform as a pharmacy for the mind. It has three main sections:

Door 1, The Pharmacy Shelves. Books are grouped by emotional need, not by topic. Painkillers covers anxiety, sadness, regret, anger, and fear. Soul Vitamins covers self-development, contentment, and joy.

Door 2, The Cognitive Clinic. A daily mood check and short psychological quizzes produce a “cognitive prescription”: a daily book “dose” and a weekly novel. I wrote the full content for the first quiz, the Feeling Compass. It has 5 questions that identify the user’s dominant emotional state and send them to matching reading paths.

Door 3, The Support Group. Star ratings are replaced by “Healing Experiences.” Reviews answer the question “How did this book affect me emotionally?” and are organized with emotional tags. The section also includes a monthly virtual reading club.

I also defined the visual language: calm blues, mint greens, and pastels, a clean grid of book covers, and a short quote at the top of each section to settle the reader before they browse. I mapped the full user journey (diagnose, get the prescription, browse, read others’ experiences, order) and wrote a SWOT analysis. I also explored an alternative “Cognitive Clinic” direction with six color-coded healing zones inspired by Moroccan architecture. All of this went into a written architecture report and a 13-slide presentation deck.

Technical architecture

I designed a relational data model that links books to emotions. It has a polarity score for each emotion (from -1 to +1) and a “dose strength” weight from 1 to 5 for each book–emotion pair. I then translated that model into native WordPress structures so it wouldn’t need custom database tables.

Plugin 1: Cognitive Pharmacy Book Manager (fully built, no external dependencies)

• A custom post type for books, with four taxonomies: therapeutic section (hierarchical, filled in automatically on install), emotion (with polarity score stored as term meta), format, and author
• A custom meta box that combines emotion selection with dose weights, replacing a junction table
• Book fields for price, paper or digital, daily or weekly dose, ISBN, a per-book WhatsApp number, and a “therapist-pinned” flag so a human can override recommendations
• A related-books function: it matches on shared emotions first and falls back to the same section. It is written so a smarter NLP/embeddings engine can replace it later without changing the templates
• WhatsApp ordering instead of a cart and checkout. There is a settings page for the store number and a message template with {book_title}, {book_price}, and {book_url} placeholders, plus a shortcode

Plugin 2: Cognitive Pharmacy Widgets Core (Elementor)

• A custom widget category, with a shared base class and an explicit widget registry, so adding a new widget takes one file and one line of code
• Built: WhatsApp buy button, and a book grid that filters by section and emotion
• Scaffolded with visible placeholders so designers can lay out pages now: Hero, Section Header, Section Cards, Mood Filter, Feeling Compass Quiz, Prescription Card, and Healing Experience card
• Centralized CSS and design tokens

I also wrote maintenance documentation for both plugins, covering file structure, data model, how to add fields and widgets, and a recommended build order for Phase 2.

Key decisions

• Emotion-first taxonomy instead of topic taxonomy. This is the core of the product.
• WhatsApp ordering instead of e-commerce. It fits the client’s budget and matches how people in the local market actually buy.
• WordPress-native relationships instead of custom SQL tables. This keeps the site maintainable and compatible with Elementor.
• Human-in-the-loop flag. I identified wrong recommendations to vulnerable users as the main risk, so therapists can pin books manually.
• MVP scope discipline. The AI chatbot, gift boxes, and live mood slider were documented and intentionally left out of the MVP.

Outcome

The project went from a concept to a working, extensible foundation: a full research base, a UX and architecture report, a presentation deck, and two production-ready WordPress plugins. It is designed so each Phase 2 feature (quiz → prescription → mood filter → healing experiences) can be added without reworking what already exists.