#128 - When "Small" Additions Lead To Big Changes

#128

                September 12, 2022

            #128 - When "Small" Additions Lead To Big Changes

                When working on a few extra features becomes a site-wide redesign, a sneak peek into our upcoming giveaways platform, and a fun upcoming two weeks. 😁

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#128 | 12 September 2022

"Small" Additions...

"Please can we have an 'I'm Finished' button?"

"I wish we could add to our Up Next Queue from anywhere!"

"When viewing my friend's read books, I want to see their star rating alongside mine!"

All reasonable requests. All things we want to offer!

So let me go ahead and add in these small, straightforward additions...

It wasn't long before trying to work within the constraints of the current design started to prove difficult and the pane began to look cluttered.

"Hmm...looks like I need to redesign the book pane now that the app and the needs of our users have advanced..."

Well, redesigning the book pane you see above cannot be done without redesigning the mobile view and the pane view on the book page itself...

Once we're talking about redesigning the top part of the book page, all of a sudden we're redesigning the whole book page...

"Oooh, this new font would look better here, actually...and this style of border will look sleeker, cleaner..."

And before you know it, we're changing the font and borders across the whole app... 👀 😅

Since last time...

Our main focus has been our new giveaways platform! 🙌🏾

A sneak peek of the upcoming new homepage section!

Our beta customers have been loading in their giveaways:

How exciting! 😁

We also worked on some performance stuff for buddy reads! Those with a large number of comments were taking a while to load, but no longer. 😎

Next two weeks

Lots will be happening, including:

The beta launch of our Giveaways platform (September 19th) 🎉
Rob and I working on the ability for users to freely list the types of content that they don't want to read about in their reading preferences survey, helping us to take our recommendations to the next level 🙌🏾
My birthday 🥳
The next instalment of our Instagram Book Club (More on that in the next section) 📚

Fun fun fun!

What I'm reading

I've got about twenty more pages left in Michelle Zauner's Crying in H Mart. It's the chosen book for our Instagram Book Club and I'll be facilitating a live group discussion on September 25th at 12.30pm PT/3.30pm ET/8.30pm BST/9.30pm CEST. It's not too late to grab yourself a copy and get involved!

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. :-)

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