Wanting to work on my product management and design muscles, I’ve decided to do some rethinking of one of my least favorite and most used app.
I hate the Goodreads UI, but somehow I log in at least weekly to make some sort of update.
Goodreads boasts a 75M user base and 4.0+ star ratings on the Play Store and Apple App Store.
So what’s the problem? I think Goodreads has tried to be the generic “books” app: finding books, tracking and journaling reading, and also being a social network for book enthusiasts. And with that wide span of features, the quality of the interactions lack precision and general usability.
A recent competitor has come to the scene, though. The StoryGraph is a direct competitor whose big selling point is that they aren’t Goodreads.
So we’ve got some room to improve. With this project, I’ll be scoping my rethinking to a few (tbd) user flows and feature offerings. We’ll maintain Goodreads’ ad-based revenue model. In total, I hope I can:
- Provide a clear product scope and vision for the next iteration of Goodreads
- Prioritize and plan the “launch” of our redesign, inclusive of KPIs and value benchmarks
- A prototype of the redesigned flows that have been user tested
So what’s the plan? First, talk to users. For my limited scope, I’ll just choose a couple of my friends who use the app and perform some preliminary interviews to go from there. Let’s see what we come up with!