Research & Exploration
What is the Purpose of the Book Detail Page?
The Reader’s Journey
Much of our product and design thinking was influenced by prior foundational research that developed a user journey framework we called ‘The Reader’s Journey’.
Overview of the Reader’s Journey Framework. Developed through research led by Brandi Luedeman, 2017-2018.
The Book Deal Page impacted every stage of this Journey, but its most important role was in the ‘Learn’ stage. After a customer discovered a book that interested them, the detail page was critical in helping them decide whether the book was worth acquiring.
For the Book Detail Page, I conducted qualitative research and data analysis in order to focus the project’s approach. Given the scale of the project, and our directive to simplify the page, we had to ruthlessly prioritize the most important features of the book page.
User Stories
These user stories were developed after qualitative research (customer interviews) and quantitative analysis of activities taken during user sessions.
These statistics may give the impression that learning about the book was 9 times as important than ‘deepening’, but in fact the users who were engaged enough to write reviews and discuss the books were among our most important customers.
Text reviews are a key differentiator for the company. Customers are known to trust Goodreads reviews as more unbiased and detailed than reviews found on sites with direct purchase links, so their quality is a key brand differentiator. The unique text also contributes to a high SEO ranking, something that has been fundamental to Goodreads’ continued relevance.
So, while initially it may seem that the Learn use case is the most important aspect of the page, our exploration determined that both user stories needed to be taken into account for any viable redesign of the page.