Goodreads - Visualizing Reading Habits
Unsolicited feature addition for Goodreads mobile application
The Challenge
GoodReads is a popular web and mobile application among the bookish community to track books they are reading, have read, want to read, and find new books to read. Coming from a data background, I wanted to add a new feature to an app I commonly use for tracking my reading but currently, it does not have a way for me to track my reading stats. I find myself having to use multiple apps to gather the stats I want to know. This was also a chance for me as a designer to create data visualization within a mobile application.
Goals
Focus on personal analytics improvements for the app, specifically the My Books tab of the mobile app
Avoid having to download/use too many applications
Create basic data visualizations that provide information at a glance
Methodology
Market research
Select statistics to display
Create charts and mockups
Prototype interaction
Tools
Figma, Adobe Illustrator
Role
Interaction Designer, Visualization Designer
Timeline
June 2024-August 2024
Market Research
I tested out a few different mobile apps the bookish community uses to track their reading. I chose the two other popular reading trackers and used them over the month to understand the types of features they offer.
Large database of books
Daily/Annual stats based on your reading
Track reading, using a timer to track how long you read
Set reading goals and take notes
Rate books
Bookmory
Large database of books
Social media for readers
Join book clubs
Monthly recap of your readings
Rate books
Fable
When comparing analytics capabilities, all apps only show statistics at a yearly level.
I specifically focused on the My Books tab because this is currently where the yearly book stats reside. This tab currently includes three sections:
Reading:
Want To Read list
Read list
Custom lists
Your Reading Activity:
Kindle Notes & Highlights
[Current Year] Reading Challenge
[Previous Year] Year In Books
Add Books From Favorite Genres:
This section has clickable buttons of genres that lead to a list of suggested books of that genre that the user can add to their Want To Read list
Goodreads’ My Books Tab
Exploring the [Previous Year] Year In Books tab, I see my numbers from the year before, including:
how many books I read
how many pages I read
my longest book
my shortest book
my average book length
the most popular book I read
the least popular book I read
my average rating given to books I read
There are no monthly trackers in this section or the app overall. With the data already available of books in the database and data that users input when reading, we can easily create charts and graphs for these data points and create visualizations that allow users to review their reading habits not just on a yearly basis but monthly basis.
What Statistics to Display
After reviewing all features and analytics the apps provide, the common stats found across all three are:
As shown, all three apps miss at least one statistic across the platforms. With that detail, I chose five statistics to focus on when creating the new statistics feature:
Number of books read per month
Number of books read per year
Number of pages read per month
Number of pages read per year
Types of genres read
Creating Data Visualizations
After finalization the types of data I wanted to display, I determined the types of charts and graphs that would best visualize the data.
A bar graph is best used to visualize trends month over month. I chose a bar graph to display the number of books read so users can see how many books they have read for the year compared between each month.
I chose a pie chart to visualize the breakdown of genres read by the user as this gives the best “at a glance” representation of what type of books the user tends to gravitate towards.
For tracking the number of pages read over time, a line graph helps users visualize that trend month to month.
Because the current year-end recap stats currently lives in the My Books tab of Goodread, I chose to keep the new analytics tab there as well as to not disrupt the flow of how users get to their data review.
Mockups and Prototyping
After clicking on the Reading Stats tab, the user is taken to a new page that displays a list of stats. The user has the ability to filter down by year and by month and changing those parameters will tailor their charts to those dates as well.
Users can click on parts of the graphs to view books they read in that category. Clicking on a bar in the bar graph will take the user to the list of books they read for in the time period they filtered. Clicking on a piece of the pie chart will take the user to the list of books they read in that specific genre during that time period they filtered..
