Carly Buxton, PhD

Have you heard? Goodreads is unhinged, and the book world is turning against it. Long before the emotional tides began to turn publicly, and even before the “review bombing” controversy, I had Goodreads, which is essentially Rotten-Tomatoes-for-the-Printed-Word, on my radar as a potential TUXxie (Terrible UX) candidate.

Let’s get right down to the airing of grievances, aka what I would fix on DAY ONE no matter what, if I came in as Head of CX at Goodreads. I polled my reader friends and flexed my own expert user review muscles to create this list of the most egregious TUXxie points on Goodreads. MANY of these come from my book club friends, all HARD-CORE Goodreads users (thanks, Liz, Olga, and Hannah!)

Top Grievances:

• There are two search bars, one that searches books you’ve logged and the other that searches all books, and yet somehow I always use the wrong one. 
• HALF-STARS. Every reviewer I know wants them. We just hack and write them in our review.
• Not getting any notifications when someone responds to your comment
• No way to tag friends in a review or comment
• Notifications seem never to go away…
• No way to easily write “highlights” from physical books like what is available from Kindle books
• Need a better way to mark a review as a spoiler–or perhaps to mark a certain section or sentence of a review as a spoiler and let people read the rest, unspoiled
• We love knowing when our friend recommends a book; we should be able to shelve it, tag it, or save it as “recommended by X” for later referral. We also need a better way to recommend a book to a particular person in the app, and to see books others have recommended to me in particular.
• There should be a way to edit an activity update from mobile
• Edits to reviews should not be posted as though they were new reviews
• Ability to tag books by genre so that we can search, for example, for all sci-fi books we’ve ever read, or select our next read based on what we’re in the mood for
• Ability to consolidate different editions of the same book on our want-to-read list
• The UI for whether or not your friends have read a book is too often broken or glitchy
• We should be able to read and post questions from the app
• “Dates read” is so bad. We should be able to edit it and actually change the start date, and it should open a window like Kayak does when you’re booking a plane ticket.
• It’s so hard to find your friends and connect with them. A bunch of my book club friends have been liking posts by some other Carly B for like a year, thinking it’s me.
• Huge missed opportunity for book club task organization (à la Bookclubs.com)
• Link to your Libbie or Library account for instant “hold” or “borrow” (though I get why Amazon would not want this…but come on.)
• Reviews should be keyword-searchable
• We need to be able to see the original publication date of a book, regardless of edition
• Compilations of books shouldn’t show as separate books on an author’s page (no should free previews)
• Why is the home page like a news feed of my friends’ activities? I truly do not care that Milo (who even is that?) just became Goodreads friends with Rebecca (who is that?). The homepage should be recommendations and inspirations for my next read, especially considering the data they have on me–not to mention how they’re monetized. Essentially, it should be what is currently buried in the “Discover” tab on the app. And while you’re at it, get rid of the “Recommendations” tab under the hamburger menu; this same-but-different duplication is just confusing.
• Incorrect details about books makes them hard to find; renders duplicates, etc. (I know this because I wrote one, which is somehow uploaded as a book by “Buxton,” as though I were Madonna).
• Missed opportunity to engage with authors. It is possible to be marked as an author on Goodreads, though when I reached out about the process, it was so opaque and time-consuming that I quickly abandoned it (I mean, why would I other than perhaps getting a bit more clout for the reviews I write)? The process should be made simpler, and the advantages of doing so should be radically expanded: there is opportunity for significant monetization here (I know MANY published and self-published authors who would pay for increased awareness about their work).

And yet, as with many of our other TUXxie nominees and award winners, Goodreads enjoys a wide user base of avid readers who just grind past the platform’s obvious imperfections and return, day after day, page after page. Why? Two key reasons:

INERTIA AND ENTRENCHMENT

As with Actors Access, Goodreads benefits from the power of entrenched systems. When we adopt a platform for logging our information and opinions, the opportunity cost of switching to a new or better platform grows with each new entry. It’s why CRM systems, for example, see such little customer turnover despite massive annual premium hikes (rebuild my entire customer contact list?!?!?! What about all of our comms history?! My EF Phoenix users feel me here.) Interestingly, this “inertia” benefit for Goodreads goes the other way as well. I know passionate readers who eschew Goodreads because they “never got started” and now feel like they have to dig up a decades-long backlog of hundreds of books simply to have an “accurate” account. (My detail-allergic mind just started a list in media res, which is what I recommend to such friends).

THE DON’T-LOOK-A-GIFT-HORSE-IN-THE-MOUTH PRINCIPLE

Secondly, Goodreads is FREE to use. So, like, why should we complain? Well, I think we have the right to do so. As with social media sites, you are Goodread’s value: your data, your opinions, your traffic, your buying patterns. That’s why this platform can continue to be free. And this isn’t criminal–I mean, it’s how my own platform is monetized as well (though without the rather lurid obfuscation of, say, Meta). Someone else is paying (in Goodread’s case, Amazon) for your eyes, ears, and clicks, and so you get to benefit from features that help you solve problems (such as keeping track of books, knowing what works will be “worth your time,” participating in challenges, and getting inspiration for your next read). When you know that you’re the product here, does that make you feel like you deserve a better user experience? 

Goodreads is likely too overwhelmed by the need to verify accounts (and thereby ward off more review bombing) and the compulsion to lighten up the bitter tenor in the “unhinged” comment sections to care much about an optimized UX via the enhancements I enumerated above.

A few years ago, Goodreads could probably have run a massively successful kickstarter campaign through which devotee users might have contributed willingly to fund basic improvements in features, which could have had positive ripple effects across the entire brand experience–and maybe even a kinder tone overall across the platform that could even have prevented devolvement into that trollism and review-bombing reputation it has today (though perhaps that takes the hypothetical a step too far).

So what now? Unlike with Actors Access, the DMV, the IRS, or other too-far-entrenched TUXxie winners, I think the time is right for a regime overthrow in the world of book-logging, book-reviewing apps. Reddit threads aflame. Reputable media outlets throwing shade. Oh yes, there is an opportunity for a coup here.

All it would take is a data transfer–kind of like when a new-but-better cell phone company offers to buy out your T-Mobile plan, maintain your same phone number, and upload all of your phone contacts letter by letter.

Any takers? I know two rabid book clubs that would kickstart you.