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March 2, 2020

#39 - Upping The Ante Again

A slow week, but some exciting updates nonetheless, including news of a new business partner!

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A full-time partner!
 
Last time The StoryGraph 'upped the ante', Abbie started working for us for a few hours every week.

Now Rob, A.K.A. the originally elusive 'F', has quit his job to work on The StoryGraph and more quickly advance the machine learning elements of the product. 🎉
 

Rob's work has meant we can offer self-service features like this. 😍

We're so excited to see how his full-time input will enable us to be more effective at helping mood readers choose their next book!
Last week
 
Last week was one of those where everything felt slow, difficult, and unproductive. 😔

These weeks are inevitable. I try not to beat myself up about them. The important thing is to accept them, take a deep breath, get some good rest, and wake up and attack the following week. 💪🏾

There's one development I am happy with.

Users weren't able to mark a book as 'Did Not Finish' without first having marked it as 'Currently Reading', but there were already quite a few buttons on each book pane.

So, we went from this:
 

To this:
 


The feedback from the monthly check-ins with the Editors was very good.

It's interesting learning how the site fits into people's reading routines differently.

The challenge is figuring out which parts of the site to focus on improving given varied pain points.
This week

After dealing with the bugs that have arisen from the redesign, the next focus will be: can we help our users to get more insight from their stats?
 

 
Say a user is looking through the stats for the books they read last year. They spot that they read one relaxing book. Is there a way they can quickly pinpoint what that book was, and whether they want to read more of the same, without having to scroll through all of the other books they read that year?
 
🤔😉
What I'm reading right now 

I've recently finished these two books for the #BlackLitChallenge hosted by my friend Seji, @theartisangeek:
 
 

The challenge was for Black History Month, which is observed in February in the United States and Canada.

Click on the book panes above to see my review for each and then hit 'Reply' to let me know your thoughts!

Have a great week,

Nadia

P.S. If you know a friend who's an avid mood reader or would enjoy following along with this journey, please do forward this email to them! Thank you. :-)

 
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