Anna Di Iulio, Max Hibbard ReaderHub Phase I: Analyzing Users, Competitors, and Initial Designs
ReaderHub is a platform that aims to give readers space to connect and interact, other than building their own online library and being able to write reviews and keep up with news and receive personal recommendations based on what they already read and enjoyed. The reason we came up with this idea is that using UX research methods such as competitive analysis and the use of personas and scenarios, we found that no such service is available for readers. There is no platform for them to share their interests as well as keep track of the books they read. Usually, these two aspects are dealt with in different apps and websites, so people who enjoy reading have to switch between two or more platforms to receive the services we want to provide on one single website.
The first method we used that led us to better understand the needs of our potential customers was the competitive analysis. This method allowed us to find the strengths and weaknesses of our main competitors. We started by researching the most popular apps and websites among readers. Although we admired how some of them handled for example the recommendation aspect or the news aspect, we found that none of them offered an efficient social media feature. Even if most of them offered an inbox as soon as you logged into your profile, that was almost never used for any other reason if not to receive ads and news targeted to that specific user. We also discovered that readers often turned to traditional social media platforms to talk about books, creating different subsections of apps like Twitter or Instagram to connect with people who shared their interests. This shows that readers want to connect with each other, it’s just that as of right now there is no dedicated space to do so. That is why we came up with this idea and we believe that there is a market for it to become an actual product that can be in some way helpful to our target. This method also showed that our competitors’ platform are generally hard to navigate and the designs are cluttered. We aim to build a product that is much more simple, where users are able to switch between pages easily and the design is uncomplicated and straightforward.
To better understand our users, we used a second research method that is quite popular among UX engineers, which is to write personas and scenarios. Personas are fictitious users that, in our case, are based on the data that we found with the competitive analysis. Scenarios are contexts in which our persona might turn to our app. The reason this method is useful is that you are able to get to know better the needs and wishes of your users, who right now are faced with problems that your product might be able to solve. For example, we talked about the need to connect with people, as well as the need to discover new books and learn what people thought of those specific books. In doing so, we were able to step into our customers’ shoes and actually learn what it would be like for them to use our product. We analyzed the goals that these personas had and started sharpening our idea in order for it to accommodate the users’ necessities and help them complete their tasks in the easiest way possible.
We used a Heuristic Evaluation of GoodReads to get a better understanding of the design of their website and user interaction. A Heuristic Evaluation is a review of a product with certain key things in mind to determine any problems. The visibility of the system status was accurate with what was happening on the website however there are some issues as information has to be added manually. For example, the page number of a book you are reading has to be manually added to the site as well as when you finish a book you have to manually move it to the read list. The match between the system and the real world is great as it uses common methods developed, like a trash can icon to delete something from your list, but there is still room for improvement. To navigate through the system, some shortcuts are in English. This is not a problem in English-speaking countries but in other parts of the world, the words to navigate the site are still in English despite it not being an English-speaking country, User control and freedom on Goodreads is a bit lacking as you have to be signed in to access most of the features on the site and once you started signing up for the site there was no way to exit the process. You can’t add or remove books from your profile and have to go to the main book page. The consistency and standards of the site are great as it feels consistent with conventions. Goodreads error prevention is great but doesn’t provide confirmation requests when doing things on their site (Logging out, removing books, etc). The recognition and recall of the site are great as everything is easy to recognize as books have pictures to help you recall them. The flexibility and efficiency of the site are ok with lots of customization but there are some improvements as the site needs you to have 20 books on your reading list in order to create a recommended book list. The aesthetics and minimalist design were ok but there were a lot of ads that took up a ton of space and the pages were a bit cluttered with options you may not want. The site has a help page to help users recognize, diagnose and recover from errors. The help page has two sections, the most popular questions asked based on topic and a question and answer type forum. There do seem to be some errors on the site based on the help page forum. One of the errors is that the app sometimes doesn’t let you in.
To conclude, we now know what we need in order to create a product that can be useful to our customers. Before starting this analysis process, we only knew that we wanted our product to be focused on the social media aspect since that was what was completely lacking in our competitors. Yet, through this research, we found out that there is much more to that. We studied similar apps thoroughly and we learned that we need a few other things to make our product better than what is offered. For example, we know that we need a minimalistic design that is not cluttered with advertisements, or that we need a more flexible algorithm for recommendations, that works even if you haven’t rated many books yet. A way to implement this might be to base it not only on the books you rated but also those that you already read or want to read. This is obviously not going to work perfectly when a user has just joined the platform, but it can become more accurate the longer the person interacts with it. We also thought it would be a good idea to implement a home page that lets you see the posts made by the people you follow. In this way, the social media aspect is even more enhanced and interaction between users is highly encouraged. We also thought of making the platform more accessible to international customers by using symbols for shortcuts rather than English words.
Our final idea is not perfect though, there are a few aspects that need to be improved or some issues that as of right now we are unable to solve. An example of this might be the login feature. We have highly criticized most of our competitors since they required a user to log in in order to take advantage of all the features present in the platform, but we found out that this aspect is inevitable. This is because our product is a social media platform, meaning that each user needs to have their own personal profile in order to interact with other users, which makes the login necessary. Furthermore, the methods we used are based on assumptions about our users rather than actual feedback that we got from them. Of course, we researched reviews that users wrote about our competitors, but our product has never received any direct opinion.
It is important to note that this is just the first step in the creation of our product. As we progress features might change and develop as we gain more insights into our target market.