Moving from Road-Mapping to Block-Building
Maile Allen, Emily Flores, Shaina Jaramillo and Eliza Pillsbury
In our competition analysis, we analyzed three major platforms in the book space, which included: GoodReads, Storygraph, and Amazon Kindle Store. When analyzing all of these platforms further, some things that immediately stood out to us is that mostly all of these platforms had an aesthetically outdated look to its platform, a poor personalized recommendation system, and weak community aspects to its platforms. These were all features that we felt were extremely important to us as we continue to imagine our mobile app.
Further, the interviews we had conducted also concurred with the same observations that we noted from our competition analysis, which was that readers felt that there was a missing personalized and intuitive experience in their book recommendation systems. For example, one interviewee explicitly expressed the want for a platform similar to Letterboxd; a community-based platform in which you are able to share your ratings of films you’ve watched with your friends. Another interviewee noted that their algorithm on Tiktok wasn’t sufficient enough to recommend good books, and often had to “train their algorithm” in order to get better results, and even then results were not always satisfactory.
Based on the information we gathered in this inspiration phase, we believe there is an unfulfilled need for an intuitive, taste-driven platform with a low barrier to entry, bringing diverse and personalized recommendations to readers of all levels. In order to tap into the preexisting communities on platforms such as TikTok and Goodreads, we want to prioritize the ability to integrate one’s data and share on their social media accounts.
In addition to this, we also found that readers, even those who are extremely plugged into book platforms, still seem to default to word-of-mouth recommendations from their friends, so it will be important for our product to include a vibrant community feature.
Our two most significant improvements on our competitors will be in how we characterize books and how users can move through reviews. We found that readers were interested in characteristics of books that are not often included: Though the genre or a synopsis are crucial in readers’ decisions to pick up a book, we also want to categorize books based on themes, tropes, and the demographics of the characters. Similarly, the average rating is not always the most informative element of a book’s reviews, especially when the audience for a certain genre might artificially inflate the ratings relative to a different genre. Therefore, these two concepts, characteristics of books and innovating the ways users can navigate book reviews, are both concepts we are excited to prototype and test out in the next phase of our project.
We felt very confident in our idea and its prospective design, when we encountered an app called Likewise that purported to serve the same niche: “a dating app for books.” Upon further investigation, we still feel like the community, discovery, and personalization features leave much to be desired. We’re excited to continue improving upon pre-existing platforms to better serve readers.
