Product? Goodreads

What does it do? Track books you are reading, see what friends read and discover new books based on what you’ve read

Home page

• Clear sign up form with just 3 fields: name, e-mail and password

Book recommendations from friends: social connect

• Little strange “getting started” title at the top
• Progress bar is good, so this is step one of four
• I like it that there is a clear explanation of what will happen with the contacts liked to the site
• They explicitly say that they store contact information as hashes: good stuff

How many books do you read in a year / select genres

• First action is to select the number of books I read in a year. Not sure what is done with this information.

• After this, I can select the genres I like
• I do not have to select at least a couple of genres, it is optional

Rate books I’ve read

• Based on the books I’ve read Goodreads will give me personalized recommendations
• I like the progress bar, could use some animation though (no animation is used in Goodreads by the way, could really enhance the overall experience)
• Once I’ve selected books, more books like them pop up to either mark as read or mark as want to read for later

Recommendations

• Because I did not rate enough books, no recommendations are available. The previous screen showed recommendations, so why not show them here as well?

Push to connect Facebook

• Don’t see this often: Goodreads wants me to allows them to publish on my Facebook timeline
• These dialogs could use some design love, especially the placement of the close cross is really bad

The Goodreads feed

• This view is really chaotic, all kinds of different buttons and actions to take
• Overall Goodreads is a great platform for discovering books and seeing what friends read, but it could really need a fresh, consistent design