Goodreads Redesign — Claire Chiu

The Problem

Goodreads has a loyalty problem. Not in the sense that users are leaving, but in the sense that they stay despite the app, notbecause of it. As an avid reader and long-time user myself, I knew this feeling firsthand: the app that's supposed to make reading more enjoyable was consistently getting in the way.

The core tension I identified: Goodreads is trying to be both a personal reading tracker and a social platform, and its mobile app does justice to neither. Features users rely on daily are buried while rarely-used ones take up prime real estate. The visual design hasn't meaningfully evolved in years. And a quiet but significant gap between desktop and mobile functionality forces dedicated users to context-switch between platforms just to do basic things.

Research & Discovery

With one week to work, I kept my research focused: I gathered feedback from five dedicated Goodreads users — myself and four friends who use the app regularly. My goal was directional clarity. Where does the app consistently fail its most committed users?

I spoke with a range of user types: The Casual Tracker (reads regularly, uses Goodreads mainly to log finished books), The Power User (maintains detailed shelves, tags, and reading statistics), The Social Reader (most interested in friends' reviews and community features), and The Discovery-Seeker (primarily uses Goodreads to find new books).

The feedback fell into three clear clusters:

The app buries what users actually want.

Users come to Goodreads primarily to track their reading and browse books, but accessing your own profile requires navigating into a hamburger menu, Search and Discover are redundantly separated into different tabs, and the home feed is cluttered with low-value notifications. The Power User put it plainly: “Accessing my profile shouldn’t be buried in the menu.” The Casual Tracker noted that the menu was full of features she’d never once used: “Giveaways? Who is using that?”

I always check what my friends are reading, but I can never find that tab. I end up just Googling instead.
The Casual Tracker

Personal tracking is underpowered for what users actually want from it.

Users love data about themselves, such as streaks, monthly reading stats, personal notes on books. Goodreads has the raw material for this but surfaces almost none of it well on mobile. Additionally, users want to be seen and understood through what they read. The Discovery-Seeker drew a comparison that stuck with me: she wanted Goodreads to surface new releases by authors she already loves, the way Spotify’s Fresh Finds surfaces new music from artists you follow. The insight was sharp: stop showing users a firehose of everything published this week and start showing them what’s actually relevant to them.

I wish there were a section to take personal notes on books. The majority of users on Goodreads just want to read and track for personal means.
The Power User

The social features exist but feel unfinished.

Users don’t want to abandon the social layer, they want it to work. Reviews are the most valuable social content on Goodreads, but they’re hard to find per book and mixed in with low-signal feed noise like friend-of-friend activity. The Social Reader wanted to see friends’ reviews surfaced prominently on each book’s page. Meanwhile, The Power User wanted granular control over what appeared in her feed, like the ability to mute certain activity types entirely. The underlying frustration was consistent: Goodreads gestures toward being a social platform without committing to it.

I don't want a list of 'books you might like.' I want to know what people I know are actually reading.
The Social Reader

Design Decisions

Given the one-week timeline, I made a deliberate choice: one focused, high-fidelity pass rather than multiple rough iterations. The constraint forced prioritization. I identified three areas where user feedback was loudest and where design changes would have the highest leverage.

01

Navigation restructure

The Insight

Users' most-accessed destinations — their profile, their books, discovery — were either buried in a menu or split across redundant tabs.

The Decision

I replaced the existing navigation with a persistent bottom nav bar with four tabs: Home, My Books, Explore, and Profile. This promotes the destinations users visit most to always-visible, one-tap access. The hamburger menu was retained but deprioritized — stripped of low-value items and reserved for secondary settings and customization. Search was consolidated into Explore, reflecting how users actually think about discovery rather than how Goodreads had historically organized it.

Why This

Navigation is the skeleton of any app. Getting it wrong taxes every single interaction; getting it right makes everything else feel easier. It was also the most consistently mentioned pain point across all five users.

02

Personal tracking

The Insight

Users think of Goodreads as their personal reading record first and a social platform second — but the app doesn't reflect that priority.

The Decision

I redesigned the My Books and Profile screens to front-load the data users care about: reading streaks, monthly snapshots, currently-reading progress at a glance. I added a personal notes feature to the book detail view — a frequently requested but entirely absent capability. I also introduced a tag-based shelving system that lets users organize and filter books across multiple categories simultaneously, replacing the more rigid existing shelf structure.

Why This

The most beloved tracking apps — Letterboxd, Strava, even Spotify Wrapped — succeed because they make users feel seen by their own data. Goodreads has years of rich reading data per user and largely fails to surface it in ways that feel personal or satisfying.

03

Social feed

The Insight

The home feed was mixing high-value content (friends' reviews, ratings) with low-value noise (friend-of-friend activity, generic recommendations), making the whole feed feel cluttered and easy to ignore.

The Decision

Rather than overhauling the social layer entirely, I streamlined it. The home feed was refocused on high-signal activity from people users actually follow. A monthly snapshot header was added at the top of the home screen — a personal check-in that grounds the social feed in your own reading context before showing you what friends are doing. The book detail page now surfaces friend reviews prominently alongside community reviews, making the social layer feel useful rather than ambient.

Why This

A full social redesign was out of scope for one week, and overbuilding social features that users hadn't explicitly asked for would have been solving the wrong problem. The feedback was clear: users didn't want more social features, they wanted the existing ones to work better.

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