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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!
Comments
The new interface is hard to read. I now have to squint on Android mobile to read book titles :( and I don't even have poor up-close vision. I think this is an accessibility concern. Either reverting back to the previous ratio/scale or something between now and what we had.
samtheowl96 +1 to this. It's also hard to edit your progress. You can also open multiple progress editing modals and they'll overlap with no way to close them. I'm just finding this very difficult to work with.
samtheowl96 agree! It's just a smidge too small. I appreciate the need to fit everything onto our tiny screens (especially for the new currently reading section on the home page). I know I can adjust the font size on my phone settings but that adjusts across the board for all apps/displays. Not an ideal solution.
I wasn't too sure where to put this comment but I've noticed the AI personalized preview is not handling the "Aspects I might not like or haven't read recently" well. It seems like a newly implemented feature and it frequently contradicts itself and I'm finding it's negative analysis frequently wrong (although positives remain mostly fine).
Right now it's trying to analyse what a star rating means for an unread book from information provided about mood/themes/genre/tropes. I think that makes sense when you're broadly saying "X book is for readers of X" per the Storygraph preview. Generally a book with found family and lighthearted themes would probably appeal to people who like cozy fantasy.
However, when it comes to aspects that I, specifically, might dislike then then it's way off base a lot. For example for Thornhedge it noted I might not like dark themes as I rate books with dark themes lower. This makes no sense. When I look at my all time stats (which span 2022 - now) books with a dark theme are my third highest rated mood at 3.72. It's also very weird because my 2023 - 2024 stats dark moods are in my top three rated moods. So obviously dark themes/moods ought not to be a reason to dislike a book, I clearly like books with dark moods/themes. So why would your AI assume that I might dislike the dark moods or tell me that I rate it lower than others? Lower than what? My top two moods?
Your negative analysis falls down because there's little data on what I specifically dislike and there is no way for me to correct the deficit and tell the AI what I like AND dislike about a book I've rated (since it seems to be doing a comparative analysis you'd need likes and dislikes). If you're going to keep the negative aspect I'd strongly suggest implementing a way to tell you what we like AND dislike about a specific book to fix the possible reasons for the mistake.
Reasons why it can't be relied on to tell you what I dislike include:
Survivorship bias in the data
I have very few below average starred reads. This is because if I think a book is below average I will generally DNF it, or if I know a book is one I won't like I won't even start reading it.
However it appears you're not taking DNFs into account (no analysis has referenced a DNF'd book, even the analysis for the DNF'd book won't reference the fact that I DNF'd) and I have very few books rated below average that I have finished for the AI to reference.
I've read and rated, or DNF'd, 313 books on your app. Of those 27 are DNFs, and 25 are rated below average between 0 - 2.75. So that means I've disliked 17% of books I've read or attempted to read, which means the AI has far less data to work with. If you exclude DNFs like I think you might be doing that drops to 9% of books I've read/rated that I dislike.
Additionally, there's no way for you to differentiate a theme/mood/genre/trope that I simply haven't read for one I actively dislike and avoid reading because you won't have any data on it.
This is particularly obvious when it makes an analysis like "you haven't read many books with a middle aged protagonist recently therefore we don't know how you'll react". I like books with middle aged protags. Do you have any idea how rare books with a middle aged main character are in fantasy? Particularly when the main character is also female. The genre as a whole skews towards 18-23 year old main characters. You can't assume that a protagonist being middle aged is a potential negative just because I haven't read that recently as younger protagonists are the default in the genre. Things I haven't read recently feels like it's just reflecting publication trends rather than my own preferences.
The AI can't account for mixed or average ratings because it only takes mood/genre/tropes/themes into account
It often notes I have mixed ratings for certain themes, I assume that comes about when I have multiple books similar in terms of themes, moods, tropes and the ratings vary from like 1 star to 5 star. In my case the reason for the mixed rating has nothing to do with the theme/trope/mood and, usually, is either is down to the quality of writing, which includes consistent pacing and structure, or down to the way that theme was handled in text. A book that I think is overall just badly written will never make it into my 4-5 star reads. However, you don't collate this data (outside of text reviews users leave) so your AI can't tell this is a factor.
Because the analysis is only looking at mood/theme/tropes/genre in relation to star rating I think this is leading to some strange analysis. E.g. Epic Fantasy, political intrigue.
I've attached my preview for the Final Empire. The AI constantly suggests I don't like epic fantasy. In the preview attached it thinks that because I gave some books in the Wheel of Time series a 3, and other books in that series a 5, I might not like epic fantasy. That's a 15 book series where all the books are in excess of 500 pages. I've read it multiple times over and I haven't yet rated a book in that series as below average. I'm pretty damn sure that ought to indicate I'm a fan of epic fantasy. It's seeing the mixed ratings, but is attributing it to the sub-genre epic fantasy rather than the actual reasons I have those mixed ratings (the author became a better writer as he wrote the series, early books are less well written than the later ones). I also rated Final Empire itself a 2.5 because the writing is bad, as you can tell from my tags.
It suggests for the Poppy War that I might not like political intrigue because I rated Kingdom of Copper at a 3. However, it tells me I might like books with Political Intrigue in the analysis for State Tectonics, because I enjoyed the theme in two other fantasy books I rated highly. That feels unhinged.
Add in the lack of data noted above and this problem becomes compounded.
(Separately it's not clear what recent means. It pulls up books I last read in 2022, and ignores more recent books with the same aspects. Considering I started storygraph in approx nov - dec 2021 you're pulling from almost my entire reading history on your app.)
I don't know if we can still ad to this post or if this is the right place for this struggle.
I always seem to struggle with the "owned" feature. I love that I can mark which books I own but the way it is displayed always boggles my mind.
If I haven't marked a book yet (or don't own it) the button reads "mark as owned" - that is always super clear to me!
But if I come back to book a little while later and open the drop down and it reads "owned" I find myself unsure to remember what the states of this button are? Do I have to press is to mark it as owned? Is it already marked as owned?
With the text "owned" my brain somehow expects me that it is highlighted if owned and not highlighted if not owned.
Maybe a highlight or a different vocab would make that clearer.
Or if marked as owned maybe that information could move out of the drop down and be displayed with the book information so I don't need to check the drop down ever again after marking it.
_sarah_key This has come up before! We'll definitely change it to make the distinction more obvious. In the old design we had colours that made it clearer.
Today I noticed some oddities and opportunities with the buddy reads pages specifically; apologies if these are already on the radar.
When you're looking through the list of live buddy reads there is a link to "view buddy read" but the only additional info given on that second page is the number of participants and the join button. Seems like that info and the join button/link could be added to the first page to reduce clicks.
I also think as a user I typically expect to be able to see upfront the information I'm able to sort/filter a list by. So in this case if I can sort by newest/oldest I would expect to see the posted date on that front page,same goes for # of participants and activity level which are not visible but are sortable
Also, if you wanted/needed to keep the second page, additional information could make the click more worthwhile (Some of these might also be useful for readalongs. Also, I think many of these cross the line into new features so apologies if this isn't the right place)
This last one might be my own ignorance but does the filter "buddy reads with friends" mean buddy reads your friends are participating in, hosting, or both? Might be useful to adjust the wording or have a tooltip explaining what that filter does more explictly.
Again with showing the information that is relevant and especially if the filter does both it would also be helpful to have something on the buddy read listing itself (or on that clickthrough page) to explain why a buddy read shows up under that filter, like "# participants, including # friends", "# of participants including, (friends listed by usernames)" , or "Hosted by (your friend) username".
weepy_iskwew Thank you for all of the feedback. It has been noted! They won't be addressed in this post, which has a set scope of work now, and will be closed off hopefully by the end of this year.
The reason for that second page though is because people can link to their buddy reads directly on other platforms, etc. So it's essentially the landing page for a buddy read when you're not part of it. Doesn't mean there isn't some optimisation that can't be done with the UI and UX between the directory view and clicking to join though, but that's why that view exists. Inviting people to join buddy reads came before we had a public directory.
Nadia Thank you for always taking the time to respond to everyone's suggestions. Even when the answer is "not right now" it's so cool to feel like I'm a part of this in some way. Also, love Storygraph in general but that probably goes without saying.
weepy_iskwew Awww, what a lovely comment. Thank you so much!!
Suggestion: Auto-Close Dropdown in Language Filter for Switching Editions Menu
Problem:
In the iOS app, when using the switching editions menu for a book, the language filter opens a dropdown. After selecting a language, the dropdown remains open instead of closing automatically. This behavior overlaps and hides the filter button, forcing users to click elsewhere to close the dropdown intentionally.
Suggestion:
Auto-close the dropdown menu when a language is selected.
Support for the Change:
Overall, this small change can enhance the user experience by simplifying the filtering process and making the interface more user-friendly.
I hope this is the right place for this suggestion. Please let me know if it should be moved elsewhere.
Daschi Hello! Thank you for the detailed, structured comment. This may eventually have to become a separate post because this long-running one should hopefully be closed out this year and the main scope for the work has already been set. The dropdown is like this purely to allow for multiple language selection and this is the first complaint we've had on this in the several years it's been this way, meaning that I'd be wary of changing the behaviour without some quick customer research. However, your feedback is noted!
Nadia I understand the hesitation if no one else has raised this issue before. I'm relatively new to StoryGraph, and this particular behavior bothered me from the beginning. Regardless, I love the app and truly appreciate all the great work that went into it. Keep it up!
Daschi What a lovely comment and I look forward to having you on board as a user!
Nadia I know I am probably in a minority but as i read books in German and English I liked the behavior.
But if it is more convenient for a lot of users I would understand that it get changed.
hopefully this is in the right place but - it would be great to be able to filter reviews by format or edition. my use case is wanting to read what people think about an audiobook specifically, as this may inform whether i listen to a specific edition.
beanjoles Oops, I missed that this is in Next Up. Woo!
beanjoles Yes, coming relatively soon. In the next couple months, hopefully.
would love to be able to add stars to a book separately from the review page, it's super time consuming when i don't want to write a review and just want to add stars since they're not at the top and in a drop down menu
I would love to have sliders instead of drop-down menus on the review page. I don't think yes/no/it's complicated gives enough nuance, and I don't want to put "it's complicated" every time my answer to those questions are "Yes, but..." or "No, but...", that would lead to a lot of "it's complicated"'s. And by showing this on a scale on the book info page you can easily see how much character development there is or how lovable the characters are.
ingridkh I completely agree with this suggestion and believe it would significantly enhance the user experience. Sliders would provide a much-needed level of nuance that the current yes/no/it's complicated options lack. Many of us find ourselves frequently selecting "it's complicated" because our answers are often more conditional and nuanced, such as "Yes, but..." or "No, but...". This leads to a repetitive and less informative user input.
With sliders, users can more accurately convey their opinions and experiences, providing a more detailed and useful review. This, in turn, would greatly benefit others looking at the book info page, as they could quickly and easily gauge aspects like character development and the likability of characters. Implementing this change would not only make the review process more satisfying for users but also enhance the overall quality and utility of the reviews themselves.
I don't mind the AI summary feature, in fact I use it sometimes, which is why I have it on, however I really don't think it should be above the actual, people-made summary of the book. Even more now that's in beta, and so it gets bugged with some books, but I think I would actually use it more if it was under the real summary, since the process would go like this: I read the summary -> mh, is this for me though? -> read the ai -> yes, I am in the mood for those keywords! Right now I use this feature only if I happen by chance on a book that has the one keyword that I'm in the mood for, which is far less useful.
I think this belongs here, but let me know if I should move it elsewhere! When viewing another user's read books, you can see a comparison of their star rating and your star rating if you've both read the same book, but the comparison doesn't show up if you've read different editions of the same book. The UI indicates that you've read another edition, but doesn't show your rating. I'd love to be able to see both star ratings regardless of edition.
itsjennie Yes, I've noticed this and I plan to fix it. Can you add this as a comment here if one isn't there already: https://roadmap.thestorygraph.com/requests-ideas/posts/status-in-multiple-editions-not-shown. Thank you!
Nadia thanks, I added a comment!
See mockup for some ideas.
I read 2-4 books a week and have to perform 11 steps to mark each book as read, set the date (today), and rate it (not counting searching for it in the first place). This should be just a few quick clicks.
Also, a bit dyslexic, and icons would be VERY helpful (again see mockup).
Love seeing this. Design and UX improvements are super important. There's a level of quality I could see being increased here in simple elements like Icons, Type, Status Bars, etc. One element in particular is the social feature of liking someone else's updates. Would love to see a refined icon set being used, and obviously would love commenting allowed on updates (which I know is on another ticket).
I think this falls under this category... I'd love to get a warning when changing a book from "currently reading" to "to read" pretty much once a month I somehow accidentally do that instead of changing to "read" and then have to go fix my journal entries.
Is the home page going to be changed as part of this redesign? I love the Up Next section and would love to be able to access it more easily. I think it would be a lot more useful if it was in a prominent place, such as the home page. Maybe on the side, like the Currently Reading section? I think thematically it would make sense to have what you're Currently Reading, and then what you have Up Next right underneath.
Same!!
astropova Not as part of this post, which has been live since 2021, but likely as part of a redesign I have planned for some time this year!
I don’t like that I have to click on the li'ttle blue arrow next to the status of a book to change it instead of just being able to click on the status itself.
I really enjoy the buddy read feature, but when you read from different editions would be nice to be able to mark chapter instead for procent/page to avoid spoilers
macthekat I've recently done a bunch of work to prevent spoilers on buddy reads! When you're reading the same edition as someone, the page number a user inputs is displayed. When you have different editions, not only do we add a buffer on the input page number/timestamp to make sure it's the latest point a spoiler can happen (based on the percentage marker in the book), we also show a warning note about the differing editions. I know it doesn't catch everything, but these changes allow the fluidity of a buddy read to be maintained. If it's still not working for you, you can do a readalong instead. There you can set up a forum for each chapter in advance and you know to only go into a forum once you've read that chapter.
Nadia that sounds really good!
I personally have not found the semi-new Storygraph Preview powered by AI sections to be helpful. It is such a minor thing but it would be nice to be able to have the description be what you see when first opening a page (on mobile). The AI section to me feels akin to avoiding an ad on a webpage as I scroll between the title/cover and tags, and the description. I’m not against the Storygraph Preview, it just gets grating when you’re looking through different books in your recommendations in quick succession.
jake48307 You can turn it off on the Preferences page!
Nadia saved my life thank you
Would love to see a few UI changes:
stats
section. Annual Reading goals already show there but other reading challenges (e.g. the January Pages Challenge) don't which makes that info hard to find. I don't really think that a separatereading challenges
page is useful - it would be better to combine this withstats
in one place.recommendations
page - once you clickbrowse
the interface is way more functional. It would be better to have the main interface be thatbrowse
interface, with the sectionsbased on your survey
,based on recent reads
,similar users loved...
being sections that can collapse.currently reading
, you aren't able to track your progress from the home page. Once you start tracking progress from the dedicated book page, you're able to then make more updates from the home page, but this functionality would be more accessible if it was available right fromhome
once a book was on yourcurrently reading
shelfjmanning Re point 3, not everyone tracks their reading and so a lot of people would have "Track..." buttons cluttering their homepage view. I think perhaps a configurable setting in the future is the way with that one.
Nadia I think a good way to handle this would be to display the pencil icon for all
currently reading
books - even for people who don't want to track reading progress the popup that appears when you click this icon also gives a quicker way to mark as finished than clicking through to the bookjmanning Nice! Thank you for the idea!
So not sure if this is the right place for this but.. When you are filtering searches and then refresh in the browser or pull down in app to refresh it clears those filters and you have to start over. Example: In my Owned Books I filtered it to only show me books I haven't read. Then when I remove a book, that I no longer own and refresh via browser or in app via pull down (I tried both) it clears that filter that I had selected. In my mind it should save this filtered setting in a refresh as I just wanted to update my list after I removed that book and see the new updated list but continue in the same filtered search.
Hopefully that makes sense..
thisgayreads It does. It's a known issue!
I would like to suggest coloring the content warning labels in an intensity scale based on how many people selected that content warning. I know they are already listed in order of number of selections, but I find that color scaling (one color in increasing intensity/saturation) is much more intuitive for people to internalize at a glance.
rainpunk Not sure if there is another place that shows labels in the same way, but I would echo the suggestion to any similar UI.
This is nitpicky but replace "First pub Year" with the current book format you're viewing, digital, audio etc on the book page. For me the first pub info is useless (I know for others it's not) and I don't want to have to click to see the format I'm on. 😬
thisgayreads Hmmm...that's a good idea. Might have to do a poll, but a lot of people still want to have a sense of how old or new the book they're looking at is from a quick glance.
I really enjoy using StoryGraph to track my reading.
One feature that would take it to the next level is integrating with contacts. It would be great if I could easily see which of my friends and connections are also StoryGraph users. That way we could discover each other's profiles and bonding over discussing the latest books we've read.
As the book 'Contagious' highlights, recommendations and word-of-mouth between friends is key for products and ideas to spread. By facilitating connections between existing friends on the platform, StoryGraph could tap into that social spread and help good book suggestions propagate through trusted networks and communities.
There are many benefits of contact integration and how it can create value for users by enabling social sharing and recommendations.
clairescanlon8 That's this post here: https://roadmap.thestorygraph.com/features/posts/users-can-find-or-invite-their-real-life-friends-networks-to-the
I would love if it was easier to access read books, all books, and tags. I use these features often but it’s clunky to get around. Right now I go to stats to see the books read for this year which is a few clicks. I’d love a menu shortcut that functions as Goodread’s “My Books” that combines all shelved books—and from there you can sort by TBR, read, etc. I’d also love a shortcut to go straight to tags instead of filtering through TBR. I have so many different tags and would love an easier way to access them for all books, not just my TBR.
Let me know if you think any of this seems like “new features,” but I think it’s just making current features more findable. :) Love the app so much!
kamrynkoble I was thinking this same thing the other day. I wish there was a menu option to see my most recent books read, to be read, etc instead of having to go to specific pages to find them.
kamrynkoble I hear you. You can access your tags from your Profile page for now. You don't have to go via your TBR. And eventually we'll reorganise the structure of the whole app.
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)
jake48307 I know what you mean!
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.
kpwxx I agree!
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.
Nadia, I want to add to this request. Getting to your DNF books currently takes three clicks (on desktop and mobile). Ideally, it should only be one click from the homepage. I think adding a Recently Read box that includes the DNF button (like the view all and browse buttons) below the Currently Reading box (on desktop) and below the To-Read Pile section (on mobile) would be the most helpful.
brittanyq Making your Read and DNF books easier to find is part of this stream of work! :-D
Nadia Wonderful! I'm a pretty new Plus user, so just catching up on threads and upcoming updates, and making sure I share my thoughts. Thank you for being so open to feedback!
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?