Goodreads
Enhancing the Reading and Community Experience
About:
Goodreads, a social media platform for book lovers, where users can create virtual bookshelves, track their reading progress, write reviews, and interact with a community of fellow readers.
Challenge:
Goodreads currently holds a 3 out of 5 stars rating. Users have expressed confusion about the app's primary function: is it meant to track reading progress, or is it more about building a book community? This lack of clarity hampers the user experience
Impact:
I reorganized the app’s functions, and improved the search feature, making the app more intuitive and user-friendly. With a more cohesive redesign of some elements, the UI has a more modern and cohesive look.
Type
Redesign
My Role
UX/UI Designer
Team
Just me!
Deliverables
Visual Design, Prototyping, UI Design, UX Research, UX Design, Information architecture
User Research
My first step was to start my research, trying to understand which issues the users had, google play reviews helped me with that.
The first review I found was that some features exist just in the desktop version, for example the possibility to change the edition of the book while adding one to your library.
When someone adds a book to the to read section, the book doesn’t go to the read section, sometimes the action needs to be done twice.
The friend function it’s hard to use in the phone version, it’s hard to find for the friend search bar.
Other comments are regarding the user interface that could be improved to look more appealing.
User testing
To define the problem, I used heuristic evaluation to focus on the critical flow. Evaluating Nilsen's 10 Heuristic Principles helped me become familiar with social media reading apps and refine my analysis for usability issues. As a beginner, it's practical to select a few principles to practice and analyze your chosen products.
Pain points
Once I started to individuate the problems, I defined what it could be my pain points:
The home page doesn’t reflect a core function of the app. The main page is empty if you have no friends, and it’s not useful for them, it also shouldn’t be the main feature, because Goodreads is supposed to be primarily a book tracking app.
Inconsistency of the app. Many users were unable to see different editions of the same book title. They also suggested if the app follows the website’s footsteps, it would improve greatly.
Research bar. It feels overwhelming to watch all the categories, if people want to discover new books and randomize on the genre, then we have the Discover page with the suggestions for you.
Friends research. The search bar is hard to use, it’s difficult to understand how to find friends and books, and the scan option most of the time doesn’t work.
Repetition of the same function. On your book page, there are two times the same option to go to the to read section.
Outdated UI. The app is not really attractive and modern, and some functions could be represented in an easier way.
Competitor Analysis
Conducting a comprehensive analysis of competitors' apps by testing them as a user to evaluate their strengths and limitations.
Style tile
Mid-fi Prototype
HI-fidelity prototype
Home
I added a new 'Currently Reading' section to the app's page, reminding users to update their progress. This feature provides easy access to track and update their current reads, prioritizing the book tracking function.
To prioritize the main function of book tracking and improve user experience, I have deprioritized the 'Add to friends' feature. Instead, I enhanced the 'Suggested for you' feature for book discovery and retained the option to view friends' activities.
These updates aim to improve the overall usability of the app and make it more user-friendly for tracking and discovering books.
Add your book to your shelf
On this screen, there are two shades of green, one for the highlighted text and one for the reading button. While they are slightly different, they lack sufficient visual contrast to be perceived as distinct entities. Also the reading button’s color doesn’t is not repeated in any other part of the app.
To improve usability, I used the darker green from the palette as the main color and reorganized key functions.
The outdated blurred book cover background was also removed.
Add to my books
This page didn’t really have a matching UI with the other pages. The red button used to remove books didn’t correspond to the overall UI of the app, and it was hard to recognize it as a button. In general, I found the screen flat and is too simplistic and boring.
My profile
I decided to make a hierarchy between the elements in your profile, the reading challenge wasn’t highlighted enough. There were two buttons to see the currently reading page, but you could access both of them from the same page with one click, which it was repetitive and unnecessary.
About the reading activities, I decided to leave the same structure but to uniform the UI to the rest of the page.
Currently reading
I added the progress bar in the book section, so the user can see directly how much is missing after updating the reading progress. I decided to keep the structure with book’s title, author, number of pages as it was already showed in the app.
Outcomes & Learning
✦ Improve the friend’s section experience
In the redesign, I focused on fixing the app’s overall structure, but the friend’s section stood out as needing more attention. Connecting with friends should feel effortless, yet Goodreads makes it clunky. While I improved some aspects, features like finding and engaging with friends deserve deeper research. In future iterations, I’d love to create a space where users can compare reviews, share recommendations, and truly connect over books.
✦ Measure, monitor, and conduct further research
Due to time constraints, my research relied on user interviews and Goodreads reviews rather than extensive usability testing. While this provided key insights, there’s still room for improvement. Moving forward, I want to refine each detail through testing, ensuring the redesign isn’t just visually better but genuinely enhances the reading experience.
Do you want to know more? Check my case study on Medium
