Goodreads

Introduction

Goodreads is a social site for book readers to track and share books with their friends and the Goodreads community. Content consumption and social media have changed quite a bit since Goodreads launched in 2007, so there was an opportunity to update the app to improve these experiences.

I completed this spec project as part of an assignment to design a feature for an existing site, so my main constraint was to keep the feature addition with the current UI.

Research

I began with some industry research about Goodreads and its competitors. I found that Goodreads has a real dominance in the space so it doesn’t have many strong competitors. I did discover a proliferation of other types of reading apps, however, including audiobook apps, which made me curious about whether Goodreads users are interested in audiobooks as well.

I conducted empathy interviews with Goodreads users and was surprised to find out that most people use Goodreads with the primary objective to keep track of books they’ve read and want to read. Their secondary objective is to and to find book recommendations. 

Respondents expressed interest in being able to track audiobooks in addition to print books. Even if they were not audiobook listeners themselves, they thought it would be helpful to know whether a friend had listened to or read the book when evaluating their recommendation. I decided to focus on adding audiobook tracking and recommendations to Goodreads for this project.

Define

My persona for Goodreads is Voracious Vanessa, aged 42. Vanessa likes to challenge herself to read more and belongs to a book club. While she has children, her reading time is her “me” time. In regards to audiobooks, she listens to them when she is doing chores around the house, but considers it a different experience than reading a book.

I created a user map for three essential tasks discovered in my research: track an audiobook I’m currently listening to, track an audiobook I’ve finished, and track an audiobook I want to listen to. 

Design

I started my design process by identifying some patterns from audiobook sites and apps like Audible and Audiobooks.com. I learned that the narrator is a very important element of evaluating an audiobook, so that needed to be featured more prominently. I was also particularly interested in seeing how apps that feature both print books or ebooks and audiobooks distinguish between the two. For this I looked at Amazon and library apps like Axis360. I found that they usually do this by either filtering or marking the book with a symbol like earphones.

I started my design by building out wireframes for each of the pages in my user flow based on the current Goodreads layout. There were many frames where an audiobook would need to be distinguished from a print book. Each had its own challenges with the existing layout, but I tackled this with a combination of filters, collapsable menus and icons. I also included the narrator in the book details, since this came out in my research as important to audiobook listeners.

When it came time to build the high fidelity design, I focused on making my visual elements closely match the UI of the existing app. I used muted colors, small icons, and radio buttons.

Test

For my testing phase, I conducted usability tests with a prototype of my designed app. These were conducted over Zoom, both with current users of the app and non-users. All completed the tasks without difficulty.

The biggest challenge I faced was how to track audiobooks that someone wanted to add to a “want to read” type of list. My research suggested that audiobook listeners do not determine the format they want to consume the book in until they are ready to read or listen to it. At first, I kept just one general “want to read” list, but during my testing this was not clear, so I added a “want to listen” option as well. The user can decide whether they want to put it on a general list or an audio-specific list.

Conclusion

This project seemed easy at first, but there were actually a lot of complexities and design decisions I needed to make to distinguish audiobooks from print books. It was also challenging to differentiate the audiobooks without changing the UI too much, which might turn off long-time Goodreads users who do not track audiobooks.

All in all, this was a great challenge and someday I’d also like to take on the challenge of redesigning the Goodreads site altogether.

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