Redesign
Exploring possibilities for a better android companion app.
Project details: an independent UX case study.
Duration: 2 weeks
Overview
If you are interested in books, chances are you have heard of Goodreads. For those who haven't, let me explain briefly. Goodreads is the world's largest online community for readers. It is predominantly a book review and book recommendation service.
I have been a dedicated user of Goodreads for many years now. Thus, I have been well aware of the shortcomings of the app by being in the community myself. This motivated me to try and solve the problems that irk me as well as other users of the app. The app has the potential to be even more widely used if the shortcomings are resolved.
Research
User Reviews
For my secondary research, I looked for critical user reviews about the Goodreads app on Google Play Store (Android) and App Store (iOS). The android app’s reviews were more scathing compared to the iOS one. Thus, I chose to redesign the Goodreads android app.
The most common kind of criticism is about the limited features in the android app. The iOS app is better than the android app, but still, it doesn’t compare to the website. Some users have to switch to the desktop site to use certain features.
Even though there are so many shortcomings in the app, it still has a dedicated user base; this goes to show that there are no prominent competitors in the market for now. It becomes imperative to redesign the app if Goodreads wants to remain popular among readers in the days to come.
User Interviews
I asked a few of my friends about their experience with the Goodreads android app. There were in total 5 participants, they ranged from daily active users to infrequent users.
The online interview aimed to:
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find out their reading habits;
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identify their pain points and needs;
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define personas;
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determine a set of actionable solutions to improve their experience.
Insights from the interviews are as follows:
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Users use the app primarily for logging in their reading progress and finding new interesting books.
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Before starting a new book, users give consideration to the genre, ratings & reviews, the synopsis, and whether it’s been recommended by a friend.
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The most frequently used features are book ratings, book reviews and progress tracking.
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Most users spend time on the app by reading and writing book reviews, updating their reading progress, going through lists and their shelves.
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All users agree that Goodreads has an exhaustive book database.
Define
In this next stage, the objective was to compile the insights gained from the user research to form the basis of the redesign. Referring to the user research I came up with the main pain points and their potential solutions.
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Absence of a proper personalized book recommendation system - readers often dilly-dally when choosing their next read. In such a situation, a trustworthy recommendation service is highly beneficial. A better machine learning algorithm can arrest this problem.
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Useful services are hidden away - the first thing that the user sees when they open the app is the community page, which is not the most used feature to many. Users want to see their stats, like how many books they’ve read this year or what they are currently reading. Also, in order to update their reading progress, users have to go through too many steps. As updating your reading progress is one of the primary uses according to the users, it should be a more straightforward process.
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Continuous updates from friends - users have no control over what they want to see on their community page.
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The search engine is very limited - users have complained that they cannot find their friends on the app. They also are unable to sort or filter their search results.
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Unable to see kor change the edition of the book - users can change the edition only through the website at the moment, making it extremely inconvenient. The absence of this small feature leads to frustration in users in a big way.
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Unable to give star ratings in decimal form - often readers want to give a book a rating in decimals, but Goodreads only allows for whole numbers - 1 to 5. This, to many users, feels not an accurate representation of their review. If I want to give a book a 4.5 rating, I should be able to. Having a rating slider can solve the problem.
Personas
Four personas were formed based on the insights gained through the research. They represent different personalities of readers that generally use the app. Keeping in mind the personas helps in the designing phase.
Main Objectives
Before going into the design phase, I decided to streamline the process and focus on few points. Although there is a lot that can be done in regards to the redesigning of the app, for this case study I had to limit the scope and focus on only 3 main objectives.
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Refine the recommendation feature to something that is more personalized to the user and less clanky.
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Creating a dashboard-style main page for better information management.
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Improving the book rating system.
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Overall enhance the information architecture of the app.
Design
Sketches & Wireframes
I first sketched out all the ideas that I had in my mind on paper. After I was happy with the basic structure, I reached a point where I felt confident to start working on the wireframes.
Final Designs
In the final designs, I made the conscious choice of not overhauling the color palette. The browns and beige combination with hints of green have become synonymous to Goodreads. These colors also allow the book covers to shine through and thus, the reader is able to focus on the books itself without the app being distracting.
Below are the final screens for the Goodreads android app ↘︎
Homescreen
In the actual Goodreads app, the first page shows the updates from the community. It looks like any other social media app, but Goodreads is not an average social media app. As seen from the research, Goodread's primary functions are: book logging, review and recommendation.
Keeping this in mind, the key changes I made were:
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Added the "Reading challenge" progress and the "Currently Reading" section at the top of the page - having both these sections be the first thing the user sees is a good motivator for the user to read more books and also update their progress regularly.
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Added the book recommendation section in the first page. Readers often need help in picking up their next read, and they always appreciate a good recommendation. It also encourages the user to explore more. Also added the option of "Not Interested" in the recommendation section, so that users can remove a book which they know they don't like. It helps the algorithm to pick only the most relevant books for the user.
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Removed the community updates feed to its dedicated screen. Having the feed separated makes the homepage cleaner, and users can focus more on their reading journey.
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Kept all the other secondary features at the bottom of the screen, but yet they are in the home-screen for easy access.
Currently Reading
Updating one's book reading progress in one of the primary features and it should be easy to update the progress. This was the objective of redesigning this page.
Users can update their reading progress in just 2 taps, which quicker compared to the actual app.
Key changes:
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Added the option of changing the book edition. Its a simple thing which is present in the website, but for some reason is absent in the companion app.
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Changed the rating system to a slider, so that users can have the option to give rating in decimal form as well. This has been a long standing request from almost all users. It can happen that a user wants to give a book neither 4 stars nor 5 stars but something in between these two, unfortunately there are no such option.
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Added the option of updating progress using chapters of a book.
Recommendations
The "Recommendation" section of the actual Goodreads app is not reliable. It is also very chaotic, as it has too many suggestions. What users need is a more streamlined and reliable recommendation feature.
Key changes:
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Simplified the page to have only one recommendation on the screen at a time.
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Included the information and ratings for the book. In the actual app only the book cover is shown. How can one choose a book only on the basis of the cover?
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Decreased the number of suggestions, it is to include only the most relevant books. Currently the app shows endless amounts of suggestions, but most of them are not aptly personalised to the user. It feels as if they are bombarding us with huge amount of options and hoping something sticks.
I decided to change the look of the buttons used throughout the app. Using colors to identify where you are in your reading process is helpful to the user. From my personal experience I have confused the "Read" and "Reading" state countless times.
See the full prototype →
Conclusion
Impact
I asked my friends for feedback on the designs. This was done using Lookback.
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They thought that the app was a lot more easier to navigate.
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The app felt a lot more personalised without compromising on the social aspect of the app.
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They also appreciated the succinct recommendations, which were easier to explore.
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One aspect that needed a little more work on was the UI - as some felt it still looked a little dated.
Areas of Improvement
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More user research
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Live user testing
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Using the feedback to come up with more iterations
Due to limited resources and the pandemic, I wasn't able to conduct user interviews in person and witness users interacting with the mock-ups. This would provide better user insights and enhance the design of the app.
Reflections
Overall, this was an enriching experience. Having never redesign an app that already exists in the market, it pushed me to think differently. At a later stage I would like to explore the website for conceptual redesign. Also, in the future I would like to push myself in terms of modernising the UI design, because in this case study I heavily focused on functionality of the app.