T
The StoryGraph
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More centralized, intuitive UI to interact with personal data for a book (reviews, journal entries, notes, etc)
M
maxgardner
Feb 13, 2025

I know you're working on transitioning the UI to leverage modals, which I'm very excited about and I think opens up some cool opportunities to improve how we interact with any personal data we have for a book that's unique to us. This includes things like our reviews, our journal entries, our reading history, our notes (which isn't currently accessible in the UI, but this would be a great time to add that!).

I think one problem I still have with the app now is there are just too many different ways to access what feels like very tightly coupled and related information. For example:

  1. If I want to see the review I have for a book, I click "See review". This page tells me nothing about the dates I read this book, how many reads I have, or provides any links to my journal entries for those reads.

  2. If I want to see my entire reading history for that book, I have to go to the book's page directly and click 'View/edit read history'. Thankfully, this has a link to the journal entries at the top, but it has no summary information about the review I made for the book or a link to that review. Also, this view is partially edition-specific, and I don't expect or want it to be. I say partially because it recognizes the total number of reads I have for a book—it just shows only the reads for that specific book's edition, whereas I expect it to show every read of the book regardless of edition (with maybe a link next to the read dates that takes me to the specific edition I read for that time).

  3. If I want to view the journal entries for a book, I have to go to my profile page, the book's page directly, or click into it from my reading history. This page also is edition-specific when I don't expect or want it to be. Additionally, re-reads are a bit muddled on this as there are no indicators of which "read" each journal entry belongs to. I have to parse that information myself with the start and end dates, though the information is already in the system that ties journal entries to the same "read" (how that would display, I'm unsure - it could be a numerical thing of "Read 1" or a date thing of "Read 04/2024"). And if I want to reference these notes while I'm writing my review, I have to do so on desktop because it's not really possible through the app without writing my review outside the app so I can switch back and forth between screens.

I would love all of this information to be surfaced and more easily accessible from one or two modals that I can then intuitively navigate through. I can see it maybe being split up into a review modal and a general read history modal. The former would surface the most important information from the latter, such as date(s) read and a link to full history and journal entries, while the latter would be for any personal data related to that book, which would include your full read history, the link to your journal entries, and new sections like notes and quotes. I'd also like this view to display data that's visible from the book page but that I'd likely want to see again anyways without navigating backward, such as current book status and owned status.

I also would like if the Current Reads section on the homepage was in-line with the one on our profiles and included a quick link to journal entries as well as maybe an additional icon next to the Edit icon that allowed for quickly viewing the journal entries specific to that book.

I know things get kind of muddled with all the data someone can have for a book and then adding in multiple editions, re-reads, etc. I think Letterboxd handles some of these concepts well—I'm attaching some screenshots of things I like from there, such as the ability to see my different watches, the date(s) I watched them on, and my reviews for each (where it pulls the most recent review as the "highlighted" one, which is great and allows me to summarize my thoughts on the movie across different watches).

Also, some other ideas that are relevant to this/overlap:
https://roadmap.thestorygraph.com/requests-ideas/posts/seeing-reading-journal-when-reviewing-a-book
https://roadmap.thestorygraph.com/requests-ideas/posts/reading-journal
https://roadmap.thestorygraph.com/requests-ideas/posts/quicker-way-to-reading-journal

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