Goodreads App Redesign Project
A new chat feature to make connecting with friends easier
Project Date: May 2023
Project Overview: For this project, I was tasked with choosing a digital customer experience and either designing a new experience or redesigning an existing offering. I chose to add a chat feature to the Goodreads app to foster connection and allow for easier communication between users. The components of this project were a user journey map made on Figma and a prototype of the experience made on proto.io.
The Problem: Goodreads is a popular app where book lovers can find books through personalized recommendations, track their reading progress, rate books, and interact with other readers. Despite its popularity, the app has a lot of problems such as its outdated design, clunky interface, and slow, glitchy processing speed. One of the biggest issues is that interacting with friends on the app, which is a goal of many users, is not as easy as it should be.
The Solution: For the scope of this project, I had to narrow down the Goodreads app’s many issues and focus on just one. I looked through online discussion forums, read opinion articles, and talked to friends who are users of the app about its issues and found that many users were especially frustrated by how hard it is to interact with their friends through the app.
To discover the pain points of the process and come up with a solution, I created a user journey map that walks through a user’s experience downloading the app and sharing a book they found with a friend.
As you can see in the map above and at this link, the user loves to read and her goal behind downloading the Goodreads app is to connect with her friends and share book recommendations. In the first stages of the map, she is fairly happy with her experience downloading the app and connecting with her friends through her contact list. However, when she realizes she can’t share a book she found with her friend through the app, things take a turn. She doesn’t like that she has to leave the app to chat with her friend about the book she found and is incredibly frustrated by this experience.
Using the findings from my research and user journey map, I decided to add a new chat feature to the Goodreads app. This addition would allow users to interact with their friends directly inside the app without having to take their book discussions elsewhere. I decided that I wanted to make this new chat feature as easy to navigate and use as possible by utilizing a minimal amount of screens and buttons. I looked at the chat features of other apps like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter and noted the aspects that I liked such as an obvious share button and clean design.
Because many people enjoy discussing books in groups, like a book club, I decided to also include the option of group messaging. I thought this would be a great addition to the app that could draw new customers in and encourage existing customers to use the app in a new way.
With all these ideas and features in mind, I created a prototype to demonstrate how the chat feature would work on the app.
As shown in my prototype above and at this link, I gave the user two options for share buttons. I kept the standard Apple share button at the top right of the screen for comfortability. This gives the user all the typical sharing options as well as the addition of the new “Share with Friends” button. This same button can be found at the bottom of the book’s page for even easier, one-click access. This new button brings up the user’s friends list where they can search for and select a friend or group of friends to share the book with. Once they share the book, it is easy for other users to view the book and all its information and then chat about it.
The addition of a chat feature to the Goodreads app will help to solve a large pain point for many users by allowing for easier and more fun interactions between friends. This is a much needed improvement that would enhance the experience of many users.
Results: I thoroughly enjoyed this project and learned a lot about digital customer experience throughout the process. After scouring the Goodreads app and uncovering users’ frustrations, I have found that there is so much more that could be done to improve the experience. It was a great challenge to be able to at least scratch the surface with this project, and I hope to get the chance to do a full redesign in the future.
