#46 - Goodbye, Personal Recommendations!

Something missing?

        April 20, 2020

#46 - Goodbye, Personal Recommendations!
Why we've finally shut down our personal recommendation service and what we're focusing on instead.

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Goodbye, Personal Recommendations 😢

Following on from last week's discussion, we made the decision to cease our personal recommendation service.

Something missing? 🥺

I was surprised by how difficult it was to make this decision. I think it's because I knew I'd be making some people sad. 😔

But it just didn't make sense to keep pushing a labour-intensive feature, that people needing convincing and prompting to use, especially at such an early stage of product development.

Now we can focus on figuring out the core of what makes The StoryGraph stick.

Last week

The overwhelming feeling after removing Personal Recommendations was one of relief, so I knew we'd made the right call.

But then we had to pull the plug on something else: our new "Recommended for you" sorting option. 😩

Something else missing? 😭

But this was only temporary.

The results we were getting weren't high-quality or consistent enough for us to feel comfortable keeping them in front of users.

Now we're testing a new onboarding method, that'll allow anyone to benefit from personalised ordering from the get-go, yet still provide a better experience the more that you track your reading on the site:

This week

We'll still be iterating on and improving the personalised sorting, which we've rebranded thanks to great feedback from one of our excellent Editors:

Thanks, TE. 😉

What I'm reading right now 

Starting this one today for a buddy read with another Editor: 

Have you read this one? Did you like it?

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. :-)

Haven't tried the beta site yet? Give it a go today!

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