#117 - "Invisible" Work

#117

                            April 11, 2022

                #117 - "Invisible" Work

                        What it means when you're focusing on behind-the-scenes improvements, on the road to one million signups, and viewing edition info on the book page.

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#117 | 11 April 2022

"Invisible" Work

A lot of the work that we've been doing lately isn't super exciting or immediately obvious to our users.

They're things that we've been meaning to do for a long time. Things that improve the performance of the app. Ensures it stays stable and fast as more and more people use it. Tidies up our book data behind the scenes as users add them to our system. Handles certain errors a lot more gracefully...

We've resolved a case where inputting a Plus discount promotion code on this page, instead of a gift code, caused the page to crash instead of showing a helpful message.

I go back and forth on what the product strategy should be.

Should we always have some more forward-facing features on the go, or just focus on this type of work to smooth out the user experience and common pain points, and trust our users will see great progress as the little improvements compound...? 🤔

Since last time...

We passed 900k signups! Fewer than 100k to go until we can say one million people have signed up to The StoryGraph! 🤯

Where the number stood this morning! 

Any ideas on what we should do to celebrate that milestone when it arrives? 😁

We've also fixed a bunch of cross-platform/browser issues with the display of flash notification messages, as well as improved the logging of book data edits, making it a lot easier for us to undo changes if anything goes wrong!

Next two weeks

Hopefully we'll have put the finishing touches on the work we're doing to improve the user experience around book editions.

We ran a couple of polls on Twitter and Instagram recently and the people have spoken:

The results were incredibly similar on Instagram!

We also hope to improve what it looks like when you're browsing another user's profile pages. We know a lot of users want to see their rating of a book alongside that of the person whose profile they're viewing.

What do you think of this?

Cluttered or great? Any other ideas? 😁

What I'm reading

In order to get the most out of last week's EconTalk podcast episode, I'm reading Leo Tolstoy's Master and Man.

Have a great week,

Nadia

P.S. Know somebody who's an avid reader or would enjoy following along with this journey? Please do forward this email to them! Thank you. :-)

Haven't tried The StoryGraph yet? Check it out today!

Love the app? Consider upgrading to our Plus plan!

Want to volunteer? Apply to be a Librarian!

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