This design-led, 6-month project’s mission was to envision a bold new direction for Goodreads that would re-center our product on our passionate customers. As 1 member of a 3-designer project team, I dove deep into customer research and analysis, organized cross-functional design thinking and ideation sessions, created wireframes and high-fidelity UX designs, and created and presented a prototype that ultimately swayed our organization to shift our roadmap.
I created the first iteration of Goodreads’ new book page as a part of Goodreads’ north star vision project.
[DETAILED WRITE-UP WITH DESIGN VERSIONS IN PROGRESS]
Book discovery is the rationale for Goodreads’ existence as a company, and it’s important to customers and the business.
I audited the Goodreads discovery experience across desktop and iOS, while another designer audited Android.
Our goal was to create a comprehensive visual archive of discovery experiences to help identify themes emerging from patterns of pain points and opportunities within 3 different modes of discovery:
Direct discovery: I’m looking for a specific book
Indirect discovery: I’m not looking for a specific book, but there are genres, topics, or other characteristics that are guiding my search
Unexpected discovery: I hope to stumble across an interesting book
With the majority of GapInc.com visitors arriving via mobile devices, I knew it was crucial for GapInc.com to be mobile-friendly.
Since a full site redesign was (unfortunately) not a budget priority, I negotiated with the GapTech team and my own Communications team to funnel some of our regular yearly tech maintenance budget into making the current GapInc.com model mobile-friendly.
I created responsive versions of the original design templates, partnering with a member of the GapTech team to test and implement the designs. (Again, working within the limits of existing technology.)
At right, you can see the original desktop versions of certain pages (representing the different GapInc.com page templates), alongside the mobile versions.
Recreated Gap Inc.’s aDressed blog as a single source of news under the GapInc.com umbrella (instead of as a separate site).
Highly visual and searchable for an ideal user experience.
Incorporated a customizable news feed and SEO best practices to optimize content.
Detailed descriptions to the right.
