What Is Wrong with GoodReads?

(☞°ヮ°)☞ REFERENCE ARTICLE ☜(°ヮ°☜)

GoodReads is an Amazon-affiliated website where readers can share their favorite books, explore new titles, submit ratings and reviews, and keep track of reading goals. It’s a powerful tool for any bibliophile, but why doesn’t it fulfill my needs as a reader and as a user? Here, I will discuss my agreement with an article from InputMag that breaks down the shortcomings of GoodsReads and how it has degraded into an outdated tool.

Where GoodReads most obviously falls short is its stagnant design and expired branding. The beige tones that rule the whole site haven’t changed since its launch in 2006, making the website a very unappealing landscape to navigate. The user experience is also extremely flawed as there are many dead ends and extra steps a user must take in order to complete a task. I can create a laundry list of problems that come in the user experience, but just off the top of my head: 01. Duplicate book entries that vary with publisher that cause readers to accidentally log a book more than once. 02. An unintuitive search engine that does not bring up the right results. 03. A lack of community when it comes to sharing as finding recommended books or similar readers is not transparent. The InputMag article further explores other issues (such as a clunky shelving feature and streamlined categorization), all of which add up to make GoodReads an unpopular ‘social media’ despite it being the only option in the market for sharing books online.

I decided to create this microsite because of the unsatisfaction I felt towards the documentation of the books I was investing my time and energy into experiencing. GoodReads was an unflattering vessel for all of my beautiful reads and did not feel like a special enough place to house these things that are so important to me.