#58 - Recommending or Sorting or Both?

Given my preferences, out of all the books on the site that match this criteria, this is the book I'd enjoy the most.

                            July 13, 2020

                #58 - Recommending or Sorting or Both?

                        On making "Ordered for you" clearer, and how importing books and finding your friends on the site is now much easier. Oh, and we passed 30k users! 🎉

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So, how does "Ordered for you" work?

It's not at all clear to most of our users. 😅

What concerns me the most about this misunderstanding is this: Someone does a filter search with criteria that's very different to what they normally read, with the "Ordered for you" (OFY) option on. They see the top result returned as an official recommendation from The StoryGraph, rather than: "Given my preferences, out of all the books on the site that match this criteria, this is the book I'd enjoy the most."

This might be down to a simple user interface/labelling issue or it might be something bigger than that: do we need to re-conceptualise how we take our users' preferences and use those to show them books?

Time to do some more customer research to find out. 🤓

Last week

We surpassed 30k users! Since the spike a few weeks ago, we've still been steadily gaining many hundreds of new users each day. 🥳

Importing books got a lot more accurate. Now, when you can't find your book by title and author, you're taken to this page:

Turns out finding a book by ISBN is less error-prone. 😅

One of the most-requested features since the spike, went live:

That's right — not only can you browse the different readers on the site, with newest members up top, you can find your friends by their username or email address.

But, fear not! We're still sticking to our "social media" stance. 😌

Eventually the panes on the "Browse Community" page will be improved in both design and content and we'll give you the ability to sort by readers similar to you. 😍

Finally, exploring book reviews just got a whole lot more pleasant and useful. Last week, the review page for Cornelia Funke's "Inkheart" mainly looked like this:

Now it looks like this:

Star-only ratings are filtered out and you can filter down further to only show reviews with written explanations. 😁

This week

Apart from the product stuff I've been saying I'm going to do for a few weeks now...

😬😅

...depending on how the OFY research goes, I'll start working on a redesign of the filter menu:

One comes from the Find A Book page and the other from the To-Read Pile page.

Spot the difference? 

It's time to make it a lot easier to find any sort of book you're looking for — whether it's new or on your To-Read, whether you own it or not, whether we've "recommended" it to you or not — from one place!

What I'm reading right now

Alongside reading Emma Dabiri's "Don't Touch My Hair", I reckon I'll also pick up Brit Bennett's "The Vanishing Half" this week:

I hope I love it as much as everyone else seems to!

Have a great week,

Nadia

P.S. If you know a friend 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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