I'm not sure if the devs would find this useful but no harm in trying. I'm sure you guys have internal UX people but I was trying to convince a friend to make the leap and they mentioned some ideas I thought I would copy and paste into here.
Honestly they gave a lot of really interesting thoughts that I hadnt really thought of because I use SG for the personal stats but now that they mentioned it it's really genius! A lot of their thoughts were about feeling a bit of a disconnect between themselves and the book community.
They said, "I think a big thing for me is that it starts of with info about myself. What am I reading my to-read pile and stuff is what covers so much of the first impression. right now, it feels like nothing more than a database, reflecting back info I already know.
Doesn’t entice me to stick around on the app, I have to actively go out of my way to get new info."
They continued to say;
"It’s also so big, 75% of the the page when I open the app is telling me what I’m currently reading. Like, I know, the books are literally right next to me. In fact, of all the things the app could tell me about me, I think that’s the least interesting thing it could say. If I open up goodreads at any given time, chances are that it’s giving me new info.
Even if you want to focus on being more of a personal tracker, lean into that. Let me open up the page to some interesting info about my stats “You’re currently reading 24% more than last week” or something. Or like a FB/Insta thing “on this day last year, you were reading…”. Something fresh and interesting about the stats"
Thanks for sharing your friend's thoughts!
Just as an FYI, there's no team of devs or any internal UX people. The entirety of the team is listed here — thestorygraph.com/team — and I'm the only dev!
I spoke about my journey building StoryGraph in this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efCI1ByPT5s.
Also, this year, we'll be focusing on improving the community aspect of the whole product. And we're always iterating on the UX, as we've done recently with our big redesign of the book panes and pages.
I may remove/archive this post eventually as it doesn't really suit a specific roadmap post that can be delivered. This would have been better suited to a support ticket!
Counterpoint: please don't change the app to make it multiple clicks for me to get to where I can update my reading the way Goodreads does 😅 I do still use GR bc despite my best efforts not all my friends have switched over and I do like seeing their recently reads in the feed to see if I want to read them too. But that's basically all I use it for, bc StoryGraph makes it so effortless for me to track my reading every day, and that is what makes my stats interesting!