#76 - One-Stop Shop

#76

                November 16, 2020

            #76 - One-Stop Shop

                Protecting our simplicity whilst making our users happy, reading challenges and the behind-the-scenes database migration, and upcoming design tweaks!

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#76 | 16 November 2020

One-stop shop

Another round of customer interviews are done!

Taking the findings from Round 1 to the next level, the general theme this time was: The StoryGraph is almost perfect for me, but I still need to go here do this one thing, there to do this other thing, and you don't quite do this yet...wouldn't it be amazing if I just never left the site?

Would it be amazing or would we end up with a cluttered, confusing site that did many things and none of them excellently? 🤔

Screen grab from my user interview with the lovely Priyanka!

A surprising takeaway from the interviews was how much people feel bought into and excited by The StoryGraph journey via reading this newsletter, or following us on our Twitter and Instagram profiles. They loved having an input via the regular surveys and polls.

That's great to know since I'll definitely need to lean on these communities in order to figure out just how painful not being able to do certain tasks within the product are, and whether expanding the website's surface area will be the smart thing to do!

Last week

Users can now create their own reading challenges! 🎉

It's been really awesome seeing people create personal challenges to get through a bunch of books they own or read a book from every country, design December challenges for their family and friends, or start working on 2021 challenges for the community! 

If you like the idea of reading at least one book from every country, check out Part 1 and Part 2 of this challenge by EmilyCirrus.

Getting this feature out involved a big, scary database operation.

We have almost 80,000 users so, given the screenshot below from issue #10 from August 2019, you can only imagine how I was feeling this time around! 😅

5 users just over a year ago! 🤯 

Still beta though. 😂

This week

There's still work to do with reading challenges, but the app and the site design need some attention!

We finally have a back button in the app, by the way! Share buttons are coming soon, alongside tweaks to start making the site look and feel a little nicer and a little less...spacious... 😆

What I'm reading right now

For The Reading Women 2020 challenge, I needed a book about food.

I browsed the prompt page and decided to pick up Heartburn by Nora Ephron since I recognised it — and it's short! 😜

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. :-)

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

Love the beta site? Consider pre-ordering our Plus plan!

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