Goodreads: Social cataloging website

Heuristic Evaluation + User Experience Design

Feature redesign

Design Challenge 2023: Redesign one feature on the Goodreads website.


Background

Objective

Challenge

Project process

As a redesign challenge, I focused on one feature to improve on a website I frequently visit, Goodreads.com. I chose to update the ‘my books’ feature which is a categorized reading log.

As an avid reader, I would love to have an intuitive digital space to catalog the books I read and want to read. Goodreads is vast resource, I use it to log my reading progress, find recommendations, and build a reading community. However, the website could use enhancements that improve the flow of it’s features.

Using Nielsen Norman's guidelines , I conducted a heuristic evaluation and outlined recommendations with low fi wireframes using tools such as InDesign and InVision.


Research

User flow analysis

The current end-to-end flow to add a book to “My Books”

Problems for users

  • No call to action for adding a book entry

  • No clear call to action for adding a book entry

  • Lack of visual indication of what tab the user is on

  • Inconsistent text stylings (header sentence case and edit hyperlink)

  • Unknown verbiage, users might infer that shelf means bookshelves

  • No back function to “My Books”

  • Confusing default selection of reading status dropdown

  • Post modal only comes up when user selects “Read” progress status in dropdown

  • Lack of visual prominence of “post” call to action

  • No confirmation of reading progress change

  • Update in progress status does not direct user to respective bookshelf page

  • No confirmation of new book entry


Design solutions

User Experience

01 Progress dropdown

Recommendations and low fidelity wireframes for an improved user experience

02 Confirmation banner

Banners with an indication of changes made to book entry details

Wireframes with a more intuitive default option and display

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