Even the smallest change counts
Improving the Goodreads iOS user experience through usability testing
I love reading. From young adult series like The Hunger Games to more epic fantasy series like The Stormlight Archive to inspiring memoirs like When Breath Becomes Air (which everyone should read by the way), books provide connection to worlds I myself could never imagine.
You bet I was excited when I first discovered Goodreads a few years ago.
Goodreads is a mobile and web app acquired by Amazon that enables users to discover new books, read and write book reviews, and share books with friends. It’s Yelp for books.
Here are a few of many things you can do in the app:
- Find books you’ve read, add them to your Read shelf, and rate/review the book
- Find books you’re reading, add them to your Currently Reading shelf, and update your progress
- Browse for books that seem interesting and add them to your Want to Read shelf
I give major kudos to Goodreads for having a rating of 4.5 stars in the App Store, but I’m a firm believer that there’s always room for improvement — be it big or small. Design is never done, right?
Right. So, I decided to dig a little deeper.
Challenge… accepted
Here’s the challenge I gave myself:
- Discover pain points around two primary functions of the iOS app: (1) adding a book a user has already read to their catalog and (2) browsing for a new book in a specific genre
- Design an alternative solution
As this was a self-directed project, I chose the two primary features I use and what I thought first-time users would use.
Process
Design is a problem-solving adventure that ultimately leads to a better user experience. The framework I followed for this challenge included 5 phases:
Empathize
Guerilla usability testing
Talking to people and observing them use your product is critical to building empathy with your users. It’s life or death for your product. When crunched for time to do user research, guerilla usability testing is your best friend. I chose 5 people in downtown San Francisco who have never used the Goodreads app before and asked them to perform the following tasks on an iPhone 6:
- Add a book you’ve read to your collection of books.
- Leave a rating for the book and undo the rating.
- Browse for a book in the Fantasy genre and add save it as a book you want to read.
- Remove a book from your shelf.
Define
The fun part of research is making sense of your data and identifying trends. After conducting the tests, I wrote down each participant’s pain points and used an affinity map to define common pain points.
Findings
- Add to My Books: 5 out of 5 participants did not see a clear way to add a book they’ve read to their Read shelf
- Explore by genre: 4 out of 5 participants could not easily browse for a book by genre
- Remove from My Books: 4 out of 5 participants did not see the option to remove a book from their shelf
- Rating: 2 out of 5 participants struggled to undo a rating they gave a book
Prioritizing needs
As a designer, you’ll want to solve everything, but you just won’t have the time. You have to prioritize. I ranked the pain points I found along two dimensions: how important they are to users and how important I think they are to Goodreads.
I decided to prioritize the two pain points that were most important to the user and most important to the business.
Persona Development
I created a provisional persona based on the users who performed my guerilla usability tests in order to guide my design decisions.
It definitely helps to stay focused on the user when you’re designing for a real person (thanks Elizabeth!).
Ideate
With Elizabeth in mind, I began to develop solutions for her two problems.
Problem #1: Add to My Books
Participants did not see a clear way to add a book they’ve read to their Read shelf once they were on the book detail page after searching for the book — it was not intuitive for them to tap Want to Read. When asked how difficult or easy this task was, 3 out of of 5 participants said this task was difficult or very difficult.
I created a task flow to show the current user journey of adding a book to the Read shelf:
Solution: Replace the Want to Read button on the book detail page with an Add to My Books button.
If Elizabeth is checking out Goodreads for the first-time, one of the first things she’s going to want to do is add some books to her Read shelf so she can track how many books she’s already read. When she searches for that first book, she should not have to think twice about what to do next. Adding a book to her Read shelf should be as clear as a button that says Add to My Books.
Here’s how my redesigned journey looks for Elizabeth:
Problem #2: Explore by genre
Participants could not easily browse for a book by genre. They either missed the Explore option under the More menu (which would have led them to a list of genres) or they unsuccessfully tried to use the search function to search for the genre. In fact, 4 out of the 5 participants used Search to type in the genre.
Here’s the task flow to show the current user journey of browsing for a book by genre:
Solution: Replace the Scan option in the main menu with the Explore option and add a way to search for books by genre.
If Elizabeth wants to discover new books in a specific genre, let’s make it easier for her to do so.
Based on a quick scan of the customer reviews in the Apple App Store, I saw people mentioning that they love using the app for finding new books to read as well as the scan functionality. For purposes of this study, I chose to replace the Scan icon in the main menu after assuming that the rest of the icons were more important for users, but I would only do so after conducting quantitative research on the features that are most important to Goodreads users or looking at existing data.
Here’s my redesigned task flow for browsing:
Prototype
After sketching out the UIs, I created high fidelity mockups using Sketch and a clickable prototype using Marvel.
Click here and here for the clickable prototypes.
Validate
Here comes the moment of truth. Again, it’s critical to talk to users. All the time. To validate my new prototypes, I ran a quick usability test with 5 new participants who have never used Goodreads before. I asked them to perform the following two tasks that were the focus of this project:
- Track the book “Franny and Zooey” as a book they have already read
- Find a book in the fantasy genre
Findings
- 5 out of 5 participants thought it was very easy to add a book to their Read shelf from the book detail page. They clicked on the Add to My Books right away
- One of the participants expected that she could start adding books straight from the My Books screen. She said that once she was on that screen, there would be a plus button where she could start adding books. This could be an addition to explore in future iterations — I think it’s a great idea to give users an additional way to accomplish the same goal. User test this first, of course.
- 5 out of 5 participants thought it was very easy to find a book in the fantasy genre — 4 participants used Explore and 1 participant used the search function to enter the genre
With the tweaks I made, users had a much easier time accomplishing the two tasks. Call me crazy, but is that a bigger smile I see on Elizabeth’s face?
Takeaways
There’s always room for improvement — even when you are killin’ it with the app reviews. Talking to users will reveal changes that you can make to create better experiences for both new users and existing users alike. Some of the pain points I found were struggles I don’t have as regular user of the app. Sure, the design changes I made were small, but they helped users accomplish the tasks more easily.
And that’s something always worth striving for.
Note: This was a fun project on one of my favorite apps — I do not work for Goodreads or Amazon. If you want to talk about design, books, or life in the startup world, connect with me at achen@tradecrafted.com, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Shoutout to Chris Brophy, Jonathan Nessel Lane, Leanna Leung , and @xtiffvny for helping me with this post.
