Goodreads
redesigning a social platform to help readers enhance their book tracking, discovery, and categorizing experience
Overview
What is Goodreads?
Goodreads is a social cataloging website that serves over 125 million users worldwide. It helps readers find books, read reviews, and create shelves to track their reading history.
Goodreads has an outdated design that makes these functions harder for its massive user base.
A heuristic evaluation helped determine which areas of Goodreads proved to be the biggest problems in the system:
1) No match between system and real world
2) Overwhelming design
3) Poor help and documentation
Primary Research
User Survey
8 surveyors were asked to identify how they preferred to use Goodreads. They were prompted to rate the most important features to them.
Primary Research
User Personas
I interviewed 5 different people to discover what Goodreads users are currently struggling with when they interact with the mobile and web versions of the application. I asked them questions to understand what their day to day usage of Goodreads entails.
These personas are different in the way they choose to interact with other users on the Goodreads platform. Bessie is an observer of reviews while Vanessa actively contributes to leaving book reviews.
Primary Research
Journey Map
I created a journey map for my persona Bessie to discover which areas of opportunity to focus on to improve the Goodreads user experience significantly.
Solution, Part 1
Easy Explore
My redesigned Explore page allows Goodreads users to easily view the most important book details as quickly as possible to make browsing and discovering the next great story easy.
The Explore page redesign applies the principle of consistency to make browsing books, groups, people, and lists the same process. This significantly lowers users' cognitive load whie they try to explore the different resources that Goodreads has to offer.
Solution, Part 2
Good Recommendation
The new Recommendations page creates a personalized experience for every user. I used negative space and framing to make sorting through 2 layers of categorization approachable.
Both a horizontal and vertical navigational tool is used to enforce hierarchy between the layers of information; this turns a complicated page into something familiar to users.
Solution, Part 3
Top-Shelf Saving
The My Books page redesign ensures that readers can view relevant information about books they have saved as well as make small or mass changes quickly.
The new layout enhances users' ability to catalogue books in multiple ways. These filing options are visually represented in different ways to make their functions clear. Shelves store books exclusively but selected tags allow users to view books that share various commonalities.
Additionally, editing multiple items at once is easy and replicates processes that are already used today.