Goodreads is a social app for book lovers. It allows users to track their reading progress, shelve books into different categories, share reviews and interact with other users. Since its launch it has undergone very few updates and users have been sharing negative feedback of the app in various mediums, including app reviews and social media.
Analysis of users’ public feedback identified a variety of opportunities for improvement, most of which revolved around difficulty finding things in the app as well as inefficiency when managing their books.
Preliminary Research > User Personas / Journey > Competitor Analysis > Information Architecture (card sorting exercise) > Wireframes > Usability Testing > Prototype > Usability Testing
“It seemed pretty easy to just select and mark as read rather than going one by one.”
“It was easy to use the filters to find the relevant books and save them.”
“This was pretty easy! I like the trope feature!”
The biggest challenge I faced during this project was narrowing down its scope. The Goodreads app has many opportunities for improvement and it quickly became overwhelming. I spent a long time narrowing down which areas to focus on that would bring the highest impact. However, using data as the backbone of my decisions greatly helped guide this process.
I also would have liked to do observational studies to further understand user’s behaviours and their biggest pain points.
If you’d like to see the full process I went through in this project, you can check out the deep dive here.