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Design, User Interface, and User Experience Improvements
In Progress
Apr 8, 2021
We've deployed a lot of great features, but not everyone enjoys the full effect of them. That could be because of poor design in places, a tricky user flow, something being hidden, etc.
We're taking some time to review your most painful experiences and address them to make the app even more of a joy to use!
Post below with any pain points you've noticed with the current design/setup, including screenshots where you have them! Please do point out design niggles/nitpicks also, however big or small!
This isn't about adding new features! This is about polishing/improving what's already there!
Merged posts
Comments
Work on adding books to reading challenges continues, but we're going to start work on a mini redesign, mainly focused on the book list view and book pages.
the tabs at the bottom (at least on mobile) feel wonky to me
I do not know how to describe it but the way apollo went about a similar structure worked more intuitively with each tab having it’s own instance you could switch between instead of having every tab share one instance
(I apologize, it is harder to demonstrate what I mean with apollo now shut down)
Hello! I wish for a "read" button that was not in a drop-down menu with everything else. Too many times I've accidentally hit "to read" on a book I've just finished... Only to notice it a couple of days later and to have to reconstruct my reading timeline from memory. I think it would be better to have a separate button for books that are set for "currently reading" to avoid misstaps by clumsy users. I primarily use the app.
onegin Hello — have you seen the "mark as 'finished'" buttons that went live in Jan that show up in the action menu (behind the three dots if you're on mobile) or the progress tracker menu?
Nadia Hi, there it is, now that I know where to look for it! I guess that's the disadvantage of being an old user, used to the old ways and not noticing subtle improvements :P Thanks!
onegin Yay! :-D
After using the new interface for a little while I'm still finding it a little tricky to identify whether I've marked a book as "to read" or not by looking at the drop down. This could be a just me thing, but I thought it was worth leaving feedback!
I use dark mode but light mode seems the same to me. I can barely even remember how it looked before, I just know that before the change I immediately knew from a glance that it was marked as "to read" - and now I have to take a second to remember because I can't tell if it's selected or if it's the button that I need to click to select (usually I have to click the dropdown to check).
After looking at screenshots of the old look which was clearly very similar (filled in button=not selected, not filled in=selected), I can only assume it's because in the new design, when it's been selected the button text is in the green that the button was in, rather than white or black to match the rest of the text on the page? Something about that must be making my brain think it's still the unclicked button? As I said, I may be very much in a minority here, but I won't know unless I mention it and see if anyone else agrees!
kpwxx Thanks for your feedback and for looking back at the old screenshots to compare. Will see what others say and keep this in mind.
I really with there were an opportunity to search read/tbr by language. Because rn it can be done manually and it takes a long time. :/
unavezmas We're going to have language filter options eventually!
Something I'd like to see is a book's rating when I search for books. I depend on book ratings to see if I'm going to like a book, and it would be more convenient to have the rating listed along with the page numbers and first published info. Right now I have to click into a specific book and scroll all the way to the bottom to see a book's rating. This app is amazing, so thanks for building it!
mbartman21 Hello! I'm very glad you love the app. I merged your previous post on this into this one: https://roadmap.thestorygraph.com/requests-ideas/posts/ratings-more-prominent.
Maybe there'll be a future customisation where they'll show up there for people who want that but it's been part of our product's hypothesis — can we help people find new, favourite books via other criteria — not to display them so prominently.
I'd like to be able to copy the author's name in my to-read pile. Right now when I'm trying to copy/paste from the pile to my local library catalogue, highlighting the author's name is disabled unless I click through to the book's page. It would save a lot of time and computer memory (so many tabs...) to be able to copy from my to-be read pile.
snslayer That's a tricky one, which we hope to eventually address. Removing the ability to copy and paste on that page had to be implemented because of a quirk of making the Up Next section draggable.
The ability to archive/'retire' tags.
I use tags to mark the year I read a book. I would like to 'retire' tags for previous years (and similarly, 'unretire' as needed), instead of having to scroll past previous years to get to this year.
If this counts as a new feature, I'm happy to post this in the proper place.
nackereia Yes, I think it does count as a new feature! Do a quick check that nobody has posted it before, but I don't think so!
Work on adding books to reading challenges continues, but we're going to start work on a mini redesign, mainly focused on the book list view and book pages.
Some of the ebooks I get from my local library are listed already, but they have no format attached (even w/ ISBN sometimes!). It would be great to be able to update certain fields like 'format' if it's unlisted, to keep the data clean
rollickingradness You can already do so! Click on "Add missing information..." on the book page. :-D
Hi! I'd really love to have a more convenient way of adding books to my up next queue. Now I have to first add a book to my to-read, then go find the whole to read list, and only then click on the little plus button.
It would be best if you could add the book to your up next already on the books page!
onegin That's coming soon as part of this work! Here's the relevant roadmap post: https://roadmap.thestorygraph.com/requests-ideas/posts/add-to-up-next-from-anywhere
The book minutes is adding all the books that I've read even when they aren't audiobooks
kaeliesreads The 'minutes' feature only adds books that are logged as 'audio' format. Have you double checked the format of all the books in your library? Please contact us via the app so that we can look into your case for you!
I'd love for the TBR pane to be above Recommendations on the home page. I like looking at Recommendations every now and then, but I'm usually going to my (excessive 😅) TBR to see what I should read next, so I'd like to see that first rather than scrolling past Recommendations every time.
katievh We'll be making this change very soon.
I've been having a lot of trouble searching, especially if I don't have the author's name. A book called "Bookshops" was recommended to me this week where the recommender pronounced the author's first name Jeorge correctly and I didn't catch the last name. When I searched in Storygraph, I got a lot of books where "bookshop" was part of the title but nothing for "Bookshops." It wasn't until I put the pronunciation in Google to get the correct spelling of Jeorge that I was able to find the book.
devrose For now, having part of the author's name (first or last name, if applicable), even if it's a misspelling should help you find the exact book. Eventually we'll have a more advanced search where you can specify things like exact title matches.
When you select your timezone, you have to select a specific zone rather than a location - it would be good if you could instead choose a place and the time zone would automatically change for daylight savings. Otherwise when logging books near the end/start of the day, if you forget to change it when the clocks change then the date is out.
kpwxx Have you had this issue? I thought the timezones still updated when daylight savings came in to play, because of how the backend conversions happen.
Nadia a friend has reported issues with logging specifically, I haven't checked that - will check tonight though and see when it actually changes.
But definitely the settings page doesn't seem to be correct. It lists London but currently has it as GMT+0:00, when actually we're in BST here right now (GMT + 1:00).
Will report back here tonight as to whether it actually changes and just needs a clarification in the settings drop down!
kpwxx The dropdown is autogenerated via the coding platform I've built StoryGraph on so I thought it was all handled. I'm in London too and haven't noticed any issues, though it is rare that I do updates past 11pm (my bedtime when I'm being good!). Let me know! :-D
Nadia just checked and you're correct, it does in fact know I'm in BST! I guess my friend misread or something, or maybe had it set to UTC rather than London, apologies! 🙈
So yeah, it's just the drop-down in preferences, that says I'm on GMT+0:00. But not that big a deal since it does know I'm actually on GMT+1:00 so works fine for logging purposes, and I doubt most people think about it this much lol, and would just pick where they are.
kpwxx Great! Thank you for checking! :-D
Can we have something where you can search by genre or click the genre/mood on a book to see more of that genre/mood?
sydneyannaleese Have you tried searching by genre using the filter menus? While it's likely we'll eventually make the tags clickable, using the filter menu will produce the same effect and be even more powerful because you can combine a range of different options to refine your search!
Nadia i had but it didn't seem to be working correctly? it was doing anything that had the words in title (if i search "historical romance" it shows books with the words "historical romance" in the title, not the genre) when i would search the entire site there was no option to refine my search, just when looking in my tbr list was a i given that option
sydneyannaleese You seem to be talking about the search bar! I'm talking about the filter menu on the Browse Books page (and others).
I'll be posting updates as and when I have them on what the team is working on with regards to the UX/UI improvements.
Right now our focus is improving the experience around tracking audiobooks, searching for books, and adding books to reading challenges!
Audiobook tracking improvements are complete. Now we're focusing on searching for books and then adding books to reading challenges.
We've also made a bunch of UX improvements to the select boxes (genres, content warnings, tags, etc.) around the app!
Being able to edit an Edition that I submitted would be useful, and (related) being able to suggest a cover for an Edition that doesn't have one—I submitted an Edition yesterday but forgot to submit the cover at that time, and now it doesn't have one (the other edition also didn't, so nothing to pick from), which is sad.
We're working on allowing users to add in missing info and covers right now. In the meantime, if you click "Flag incorrect book information..." and file a book ticket one of our volunteer librarians will help you out as soon as possible.
When adding a Series, Author, or Contributor to an Edition, it would be good to be able to click out from the dropdown to a new window that shows what other things that record is associated with—this can help with disambiguation of common names (as an example: I wanted to add the narrator James Lee to a book, but had no means of figuring out which record was the right one)
Hi Nadia, this app is so wonderful! I absolutely love it and am so glad I found it. Would love to have more easily accessible update controls on the app homepage.
When you first start a book, there’s no place to update progress (have to click on View All and then Reading Journal to add progress). Once started, it’s easy to update progress, but then to complete a book you also have to click into the View All menu to mark a book as finished. Would love an “I’ve finished this book!” button right on the home tab.
Hello! Thank you for the feedback. We will be having some way to easily mark a book as finished from the homepage. Regarding first having to click to "View All" or going to the book page to start tracking your reading, the issue is that not everybody tracks their reading, so for some people they'll have a bunch of "Track progress" buttons that they never click on cluttering their view. This might just be something we change in the design to make the button more subtle!
I'd love to be able to edit the start/end dates for previous reads. The GR export doesn't seem to reliably include start dates, so I spent a lot of time re-adding dates read to include the start date, which would have been easier if I could have edited the record that had the end date to include the start date. Additionally, sometimes I don't remember to mark a book I'm currently reading done until a day or two later, and it would be useful to be able to edit the end date instead of creating a new record.
We will be adding in the ability to edit the start and end dates from the reading history page, especially in cases where there isn't already a start date. However, if both a start and end date exist, you can edit them via the reading journal for that book. Regarding marking the book as read later on, you can edit the end date from the book's page or from the reading journal!
Might just be a my brain thing, but I sometimes flip numbers. So, being able to put in any page number/percent would be helpful to me. I just put in 61% on a book when I'm actually 16% of the way through. I get the reasoning that I can't unread what I read, but I haven't actually read that far yet.
In this case you can head to your journal entry, delete the erroneous entry, and then add in the correct progress number!
My request is to make DNF books easier to find. Right now I just have the page of all of my DNF'd books bookmarked because I have no idea how to find it otherwise.
You can find it by going to your Read books. The button is top-right on that page.
I understand this is a big ask. It would be grate if there was one default book and then the various edits could be further broken down from there. I am dyslexic so exclusively listen to audiobooks. Most of the time there is not an Audio book edition available to choose. If there is one after I have marked a book a read the default version does not say "read". most do have a note at the top saying "You've read another edition of this book" but I would like it to say read. When I am looking through books I can get confused because I will come across a book I have read but are not marked. It becomes more annoying when I have selected a "to read" of one editions but later miss that and end up with multiple additions marked. I really hope this makes sense and is not just the ramblings of a crazy person.
This is exactly part of what I'm working on right now.
Further discussion here: https://roadmap.thestorygraph.com/requests-ideas/posts/ratings-should-mostly-follow-the-book-not-the-edition.
That is grate! Thanks
I don't really understand how to get to the reading suggestions for buddy reads with specific people. Currently, I go to my notifications and access the link from your announcement but that's not super convenient.
Head to the 'Community' page, then click on 'Buddy Reads' at the bottom, and then there's a button top right for the suggestions.
Accessing the buddy reads section will be made easier as part of this work!
I'll be posting updates as and when I have them on what the team is working on with regards to the UX/UI improvements.
Right now, we're working on a bunch of features to do with improving the experience around searching for, browsing, and adding book editions to the app.
I'd love to get to my "Up next" list faster. If I start on the home page it's 3 clicks to get to the list so I can change the status on one of the books. It's almost faster to just search for the title, which maybe defeats the purpose of having an "Up next" list depending on what you use it for. :)
From the homepage you can get there in one click: "Search and filter" by the To-Read Pile section (which we do plan to move above the Recommendations section soon).
I agree the Up Next is a bit hard to locate/hidden. I'd love to see it on my main page or beside my current read list. Maybe we can just have a sort your reads option instead of two separate sections.
I’d also like to be able to just sort my to-read, as well as my currently reading.
Can you tell me a little bit more about how you'd like to do that? Do you mean a custom sort?
With buddy reads being newly launched, one thing I've found on mobile is how much scrolling I have to do to get through comments. Especially now that there are multiple and sometimes long comments in the buddy read I'm doing, I think it could improve the flow of the page if there was a way to hide/minimize comments or sections. Maybe just a button to the side or a plus/minus icon, that lets me hide/unhide whole sections so that I can navigate the buddy read page easier without having to scroll so much.
At some point, and this is sort of minor because it's not something I pay too much attention too, could we have a colour blind mode? I'm having some issues telling apart the moods on the pie chart (ex: adventurous and hopeful are a struggle to differentiate, and I really only can because of the white lines separating them and the fact my stats say I read mostly adventurous).
In general, we need to make that chart much more accessible! Sorry for the poor experience with it.
This is pretty minor, but when you add or update a review, I would love it if you were taken back to the list you came from (e.g. Read books) or even just the main book page instead of to the list of completed reviews when you're finished. Would make updating multiple reviews in succession much smoother, since right now you have to navigate "back" 3 or 4 times to get back to the list of books. Thanks for all your work on this, the new improvements and features are amazing!
I wish the add review button was bigger (on desktop too). When I first started using storygraph, it took me weeks to realize I could add reviews.
I almost wish it prompted me to add a review when I mark a book as read.
I can't tell if this is related to brittishliterature's comment or not, but I would LOVE to be able to add another reading journal entry from the Reading Journal page. I often pop over to add an entry while I'm reading for a content warning, a quote, etc. But then I keep reading and if I come across something else, I have to go back to the book's page and then click "add note" again - would be amazing to reduce the number of clickthroughs!
It's not related, but we definitely plan to add this functionality regardless! It just didn't fit into the body of work when we first offered progress updates.
When navigating to the reading journal for a particular book, it shows all the entries chronologically perfectly fine. But then when I edit an entry from that page, once I click Update, it always just reloads a couple of journal entries for the book. It's a bit of a pain, because if I edit an entry, I have to go all the way back to the book page and then all the way back to the journal in order for it show all the entries again. There's not a way to just go back to that previous page with all the entries for that book. It would be soooo helpful if once I clicked Update on an entry, it reloaded the reading journal page correctly.
Hello! This is a bug I know of that I need to fix! I have some code that says: take the user back to the last page they were one (because you can be on the full reading journal page or one for a specific book) and right now that code is including the specific "page" of records shown (as we paginate for like 5 to a page). Sorry for the inconvenience. Will hopefully be fixed soon.
I think my biggest problem at the moment is the way you can add books to reading challenges. It takes alot of clicks and referencing backwards and forwards to add books to all the challenges.
That's something on my list for these fixes! :-)
Oh amazing!
I'd like to be able to share links to the book webpages from the app. When I share books with friends, I like to send them to the StoryGraph pages so they can look at synopsis/reviews, etc., but I can't really do that from the mobile app.
Hello! Are you using the Android app? If so, share links will be coming soon. They're available in the iOS app!
Yes, on Android. That's great to hear!
Hi! Is there a way to share the link to (public) tags in the app? At least I couldn't find it (I use the android app), so I had to go to the browser, open the tag there, and copy the link.
Hello! Not yet, sorry. But there will be soon!
@cheesepuppy, it's one of those things that would make sense closer to the dropdown, but doesn't fit with the current layout.
I'm hoping that, for now, once people see where it is, they'll know going forward. Until it can be redesigned.
@ebbookworm — that is definitely not a general issue. Can you please email in to support@thestorygraph.com stating which phone you're using and exactly what's happening? The app has the same functionality as the website, so everything should be working there for you!
The update progress button doesn’t seem to be working in the “app”. I have to go to the fool mobile website to update the progress.
With the new update, the review button isn't super obvious. When I chose "read", I had to look around for the "add review" link. I think it might make more sense to be closer to the dropdown.
While we're talking about this drop-down, could "read" be changed for something like "finished"? That would differentiate from the different meanings of the word "read".
I agree with this and in a similar vein the button for seeing community reviews is very small and can be hard to see
The main redesign is now live, but there's lots of other improvements I'll be working on over the coming weeks.
I'm also going to be weaving in other features too!
Can I make a plug for siri integration? When I 'm driving and listening to a book or podcast that's recommending new books to me, it would be so awesome to say "Hey Siri, add 'book title' to my storygraph!"
This may require wider considerations regarding tagging and it's super nitpicky, but just in case it's helpful: I always find deleting tags after I tap on the wrong one by mistake a bit clunky. The backspace key doesn't delete the whole tag (and selecting the tiny [x] is hard on mobile), so you have to delete it letter by letter. It doesn't bother me much on my computer, but it takes a lot of taps on mobile.
This one might just be personal preference, but the tag-list being center aligned and in two columns makes it harder to scan and find the tag I’m looking for. Especially since some of the longer names get split over multiple lines.
When comparing genre stats the No of books label is attached to the wrong axis (happens with time period as well as tag comparison)
There seems to be something wrong with the width of the select-boxes, because when they’re open I can scroll horizontally and see extra whitespace (tested this on a few different places where this type of input is used and it happened every time).
Since you said nitpicking is allowed:
It would be nice if the blue footer wasn’t sticky over the main content but just shown at the very bottom of the page.
The actions inside the footer seem to be less important than the other content on the page, so any space that’s freed up for the regular content on a small screen would be a win.
@biblioseph, this isn't to do with our app (especially as this roadmap site is not our software, but another website completely), but with your phone keyboard. Are you using GBoard as your keyboard by any chance? There are known similar bugs to do with this. Perhaps email support@thestorygraph.com to continue this conversation, quoting this post!
When I use the app on android, filling in text boxes can glitch a lot. Words will double or letters repeat endlessly, and I'm not sure why this happens in this app but no others. Its worse on the roadmap (making this site unusable on my phone) but it seems to be similar, so I'm mentioning it. I've only noticed it since using the reading journal. However, just now I tried to make it happen and couldn't, so maybe its already been resolved!
ETA: I thought it might be irrelevant, but haven't had the issue outside tSG. Since I haven't been able to provoke it again, I'll just shelve it. I appreciate that you responded, all the same! Should I delete my comment?