New Navigation Bar on Goodreads

Surely your developers noticed how annoying a dropdown box constantly opening when you don't intend it to, is.

Do you guys, and the developers, even use the site?

Lobstergirl wrote: "You acknowledge that the white background is the same on GR, on word documents, on other websites. So why do you think it is that people have no problems, no eyestrain, on all those other websites, on all those other documents, ONLY with Goodreads? There has to be a reason. People are not imagining their eye problems"

It will be people who only spend more than an hour in one go on the computer with no breaks on goodreads, goodreads changes to white and the slight difference in brightness is enough to highlight a underlying problem. Much like people can knock their head on a door and develop blinding headaches only to discover that they have a tumour. It's science. It's not what people want to hear because they want the site back the way it was rather than to go to an opticians and fix the underlying cause, or worse, spend money on a new monitor. Work monitors and home monitors are not usually the same, work monitors tend to have a higher refresh rate.

Take your camera phone, hold it to your screen and put your hand in front of the lens so it focuses on dark, move your hand away while looking at your phone. lines going left to right? Your monitor is an older/budget one and the refresh rate is too low and is probably the root cause of the problem.

Getting angry at goodreads will do nothing, they won't change it back. Getting angry at me is counter-productive because I'm trying to help people understand why it's happening and what they can do to fix it, to the point that I have repeatedly given a link which will turn goodreads sepia/off white.

Sarina wrote: "F.P. wrote: "... Bestselling writers don't need visibility help; unknown writers do. Many bestselling writers aren’t on here every day; plenty of unknown writers are. ...." This caught my attention..."

True, and as an aspiring novelist, I can appreciate the need for a little boost. However, as a reader and user/consumer, I can say I loathe unsolicited recommendations--whatever algorithms being used, whether GR or Pinterest or G+ or whoever, are not very accurate and I usually get a load of recommendations that have absolutely nothing to do with anything I've indicated interest in. I ended up cancelling all GR emails, although I didn't want to get rid of all of them, because they kept pushing these recommendations on me and there was no way to simply eliminate the one. So I dearly hope that if it's not able to be removed, it's in a spot easily ignored.

Tam wrote: "JFC can there be one website on the internet that doesn't have those annoying flyout menus? Please?"

Amen.

Trying to figure out how to block them with Adblock....

I wouldn't say that the website looks more modern, it's become more anonymous and less user friendly. The strangest thing is giving up on the goodreads logo and the portal full name and leaving only anonymous "g" in its place. I don't see Amazon or IMDb giving up on theirs after various updating of their sites' designs. I regret that search field doesn't prompt search options Title/Author/ISBN anymore, new users will not be aware of searching by ISBN, current ones will probably forget about using it. I also preferred ivory background, but that probably would be too old-fashioned for this anonymous, "streamlined" look.

So I'm going to have to waste time with a drop down menu instead of just clicking what I want. Great.

It makes sense for a mobile layout, but for desktop? Why?

Dytana wrote: "What happened to the list of your friends. Would like to have my friends list back. Where can I find it at."

Same as before - under your avatar.

Learnin Curve wrote: "A website can't turn the brightness or gamma up or change the refresh rate on your monitor though. It just can't, and this is what is giving people headaches. You have white or you have off white/s..."

The issue with the bright white wasn't mentioned or noticed until the change before this when they also changed the font. You can change the tones of white by design and lighten it up, which is what a lot of people were complaining about.

Learnin Curve wrote: "Small thing. New navigation bar currently has no link on it to the goodreads blog section."

There was no link to the blog in the old navigation - at least not with the word 'blog.' It said Goodreads Voice, and apparently has been renamed to "News & Interviews" - found under browse section.

Please update the responsiveness of your app! The design is pretty terrible and the flexibility to do stuff on it pales in comparison to web. We all know that mobile is where the focus is - Goodreads has so much potential to be better.

One thing GR should continue from the old navigation bar is to show the total number of books added by you when you click on your avatar.

I don't know why it wasn't kept in place. Otherwise the rest looks fine.

Sameera77 wrote: "I wouldn't say that the website looks more modern, it's become more anonymous and less user friendly. The strangest thing is giving up on the goodreads logo and the portal full name and leaving onl..."

NO ! I didn't have to use the search engine yet. For a book site, eliminating search by author or ISBN is retarded. How are we supposed to make sure we're not adding doubles when creating a new edition for a listed book ? For those of us who read English-language publications in translation or non-English works it's often a necessity, and an enrichment of the catalogue at that in the latter case.

Dimitri wrote: "Sameera77 wrote: "I wouldn't say that the website looks more modern, it's become more anonymous and less user friendly. The strangest thing is giving up on the goodreads logo and the portal full na..."

Dimitri wrote: "Sameera77 wrote: "I wouldn't say that the website looks more modern, it's become more anonymous and less user friendly. The strangest thing is giving up on the goodreads logo and the portal full na..."

You can still search by ISBN and author, they just changed the wording in the search box.

I can't sign out! I'm on my iPad and I keep clicking on my avatar and it reloads my page! I can't get the sign out option to come up!!

The only way that I can sign out on my iPad is if I come to this discussion page and click on my avatar!

PLEASE FIX THIS,!!

Hmm, I like the left side a lot but the right looks a bit... tacky? to me.

UGLY Orange Greyish-tan combo... is ugly Orange Greyish-tan combo!
Eyecancer inducing...!

Who had this idea? -I want to slap them!

I don't like when the navigation bar coming with me everywhere I go. Can we make a section to fix it where it stands and not follow me when I scroll?

Where's the HOME button?
How do you get back to the HOME page?
Can we have the option to ignore this "upgrade"?

I liked that I don't have to click as much anymore, but I don't like the bar chasing me around either. Also, it will take me a while to get used to the color combination, but at least the bar blends in the background this way.

My first impression is - How do you get back on the home page once you have navigated off it as there is no 'quick link' back?

Home button = Goodreads logo

Press on the Goodreads logo to go home.

This works when the goodreads logo is just a 'g' as well.

I take back what I say about nav bar being always on top would be extremely annoying. I woke up to a new navigation bar on GR and it's not bad at all. It will take time to get use to it, but it doesn't cause me personaly any major issues. This is on Mac Safari. As for the iPad, the bar disapears as you scrawl down, as it use to. Which is fine as well, now I have two options. What bugs me a bit though, is the fact that on a tablet, the text is now placed in the middle, not on the left side as it was. This makes page seem even whiter than it was, too much white space. Now you have it not only on one side, but on both. Although it doesn't affect my eyes, yet (I've only been using GR for 30 min or so) I could see how that could be an issue for those who already complained about having headaches, before these lates changes. I'm guessing this was done for when you zoom the page in, you don't loose part of the page and have to move the page to the right in order to read the whole text. I see the positive side of it. Still, it's so much white space.

You have a good thing with Goodreads so please fire the Marketing guy/girl who's trying to justify his/her salary, because we're not here for the looks. You're all R&D: we're here for the database, the recommendations, the friends (hey, if Facebook can call it that...) We are not here for the looks. I say, if the avalanche of comments haven't clued you in, the last two changes have been annoying.

Fire the Marketing and increase your Computer Science budget so they can make better recommendation algorithms (like NOT Tolkien #1-#3 the Box Set because I read Tolkien #2 & #3)

The no allowance for re-reads IS a nuisance, I agree, since I'm a frequent re-reader.

Also, it's very annoying to have to see that I've read 159 pgs of a book with NO pages listed. How does that work? In the past, I get to find a librarian, who is always happy to fix that, but it took me a llooonnngg time to find that part. I joined it so it's now one if my "groups". I certainly hope that won't go away. Or maybe it'll be finally fixed? I don't get page count credit for any of those and am surprised I even get credit for the book! (And maybe I don't).

It certainly doesn't promote joining the yearly Reading Pledge y'all do. (Which was a great idea! Thanks for that.) I did notice that, because of personal health problems last year, I was late in entering all mine. Catching up didn't seem to be working and I had to look through my book titles to make sure they were there.

Also, why are there sometimes the very wrong photos of the version of books I'm reading? I'm technical, so I enter the isbn ~every time. Yet, to get the correct cover, I've had to pick the wrong edition in order to get the correct one. Also, sometimes there's been only a nook version come up for a hardcover (or paperback).
Years ago, I'd read about 35 titles on my iPad (with the apps for nook, iBooks, etc) but absolutely NONE of them could be claimed because I bought them (or got them for free) from Barnes & Noble. Is that a petty move? Because it sure looked like it, sad to say.

(Enter the half I lost HERE. Some was positive. Much were helpful suggestions.)
Oh and it happened this time too. Edits will sometimes WIPE everything I just wrote..

And I use HOME and MY BOOKS most. I see neither there. Now to see if THIS got included or wiped out.

Yup. I lost HALF of what I wrote HALF ... And I zoom in to make sure I don't hit the "cancel edit". May I suggest those to be put on opposite sides, just in case?

Not sure how I feel about the new navigation bar, don't think there was anything really wrong with it.
Can't you guys work on something different that doesn't already exist e.g. ALLOWING HALF STAR RATINGS?? Please please please, that's one of the things that comes up so much :(

Mina wrote: "You have a good thing with Goodreads so please fire the Marketing guy/girl who's trying to justify his/her salary, because we're not here for the looks. You're all R&D: we're here for the database,..."

I want a "like" button here please.

Well, personally I don't give a crap that the bar moves or that it's about a millimeter wider than the previous one. I find it generally ugly because yet again GR went for paler colors, but that's my personal opinion. What pisses me off is that GR dismissed words in bold. Thanks to that the bar looks almost empty.
MyBooks/Browse/Community should be in bold - for once think about those whose eyesight isn't 20/20 for Pete's sake and change it :/ ...please

Where is the HOME button? Why do they keep messing with "well enough" when it should be left alone?

Newengland wrote: "Where is the HOME button? Why do they keep messing with "well enough" when it should be left alone?"
Top left, the goodreads logo...

I don't have much of an issue with the update, I mean I'm not particularly fond of it but I definitely don't dislike it either. I'm still aggravted over your last update with the font and all and it has made reading on this site much harder.

But what my real issue is how you guys don't update/improve the real bugs in the site? Arranging and organizing books in the shelves is so troublesome, because sometimes double copies of books appear on my shelves, sometimes ratings of books disappear and sometimes in spite of placing books in particular shelves, they themselves get removed from those shelves.

And don't even get me started on re-reads. It's so inconvenient that every time I re-read a book, it's 'read date' gets updated, and now I've wholly stopped recording re-read books on here. At least, according to me, the date of the first reading of the book should be preserved, in case a member wants to re-read books. (And I myself re-read a lot and this has been really troubling me)

And lastly, I find it extremely difficult to control different editions of a book. For eg, I had originally shelved all the Harry Potter books in the original paperback editions. Then I bought the box set in the UK paperback edition, and I switched the books on my GoodReads shelves to the UK paperback editions, only to realize that I had two sets of Harry Potter books on all my GR shelves. All the ratings, and all the shelves I had assigned to each book was completely messed up and what further ruined the entire thing was when I started re-reading the books, and updating them here. After Chamber of Secrets, I stopped updating my re-reads here because it was just TOO difficult to take care of all the shelves, ratings, editions and 'date read' of the books.

Please fix the real issues.

Thanks Lindsay "message 357".
Found Home by accident.

Erin (Paperbackstash) *Proud Book Hoarder* wrote:"You can still search by ISBN and author, they just changed the wording in the search box."
I didn't say you couldn't, but that they replaced a more user friendly search prompts "Title/Author/ISBN" with "search books". If you are new to the site, you will probably assume searching by titles and authors, not necessarily by ISBN. Why change something more useful with something less helpful?

;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV0wT...

One thing I did notice is that the search is better. Yay (Perhaps everyone has said this but I did not feel like reading all the other comments.

Normally if you forget a letter or so your results will be nil, zero but now it said perhaps do you mean so or so.
Great!

Learnin Curve wrote: ";) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV0wT..."

Oh, I love it! :DDD

Do we have any idea in what order this is rolled out? Is it by country? Or just purely random?

Some people just love to complain. I guess they assume websites should be designed only to satisfy them. Of course they never consider that the maintenance of the site costs them nothing nor do they appreciate that the website does not try to overwhelm them with ads.

The entitlement here is astounding. How much do you pay for Goodreads? Oh that's right. Nothing. The site has looked the way it did for years and like all websites wanted an upgrade. Instead of getting used to the new, easier to use features you're all throwing your toys out of the pram.

Yes, adding re-reads would be great, I agree and I do hope they're working on it. However.

Home = if you don't know how to navigate to the home page by clicking the goodreads logo, you might want to invest in lessons. This IS the same on Tumblr (a blogging website), Facebook (a place to talk to friends) and Amazon (a place to shop) as well as hundreds of other websites.

Double copies = learn how to use the site. If you understand how it works you'll barely ever encounter double copies or any other issues. Start by putting all of your shelves as exclusive. That generally means that you can only have one copy of the book on your shelves. If double copies appear after that just x the ones you don't want.

Colour Scheme = it's meant to be unintrusive. If you don't like it, go build your own book website. All the others that tried have failed (bookrabbit, shelfari, that one with the badges) but why not.

Wrong Book/ISBN = You might not realise if you're a casual user but it's not just Goodreads that's here to fix the errors that come up. There's hundreds of librarians and yes, I'm constantly fixing little errors that are generally unnoticed = German books shelved as English, wrong covers, blurry covers, badly formatted descriptions. There's millions of books and it's a lot of work that I only do because I love them. If you're encountering an issue I can help, or you can apply tobe a librarian yourself.

Vickie wrote: "I genuinely have no problem. So either there's something broke in your computer or your browser settings.

I am going to question the age of people who don't realise that the goodreads logo at the..."

What do you mean, question their age? Are you saying some of us are too old, or too young?

I'm using this on my iPad.

A/ I have no drop down menus, why is this?

B/ When I click on, near, below etc my avatar I just get my page, nothing else. So how do I sign out and do all the other things I used to do here? Is it set up differently for iPad or what?

How do i find my damn home page? If i browse another page i can't find a button to get back to the home page. It's not under the 'my books' button or in the other menu's. I have to sign out and in again!

Vickie wrote: "The entitlement here is astounding. How much do you pay for Goodreads? Oh that's right. Nothing. The site has looked the way it did for years and like all websites wanted an upgrade. Instead of get..."

Vickie , your comments may be well meant, but they are extremely abrasive. Over the years, yes you may want to question my age as you put in a previous comment, I have worked with many hundreds of people in various situations where they were novices or semi novices. In my experience you motivate and skill up people better by being supportive and explanatory, rather than deprecating.

Gill wrote: "Vickie wrote: "The entitlement here is astounding. How much do you pay for Goodreads? Oh that's right. Nothing. The site has looked the way it did for years and like all websites wanted an upgrade...."

It must be very hard to give your free time up to work for a site only to hear people complain and complain because they can't be bother to even try. For example it has been explained again and again and again that you now click goodreads on the top left for your home screen. This isn't being a novice, this is wilful stupidity and a refusal to read the instructions at this point.

Scarletine wrote: "How do i find my damn home page? If i browse another page i can't find a button to get back to the home page. It's not under the 'my books' button or in the other menu's. I have to sign out and in ..."

To get to the homepage, press 'Goodreads' on the navigation bar. :)

My Won't Read Due to Spam By Goodreads shelf is filling up.

Please GR get the book promo garbage off the navigation - it's seriously cluttering the drop down, and a huge annoyance.

Keep the GR Recs over to the side of the Feed where it belongs.

Learnin Curve wrote: "Gill wrote: "Vickie wrote: "The entitlement here is astounding. How much do you pay for Goodreads? Oh that's right. Nothing. The site has looked the way it did for years and like all websites wante..."

Learnin Curve, it may have been explained again and again, but the explanations are amongst the 381 posts here to read through. Why talk about wilful stupidity?

Also, please don't assume that everyone who is posting here who gives up their time to work for the site, is finding it hard that people keep asking the same questions. I'm a moderator, I know of other people who are posting here who are moderators and librarians. We are here to help,

Not at all a fan of it, in fact its much more difficult to keep track or find something from my own reading or have reads reading list. I can understand why ya wanna make changes but they change the things that do work? Why change them to actually make things less attractive to look at or to use?

Gill, actually I answered this directly above your reply on this page. And you replied to the exact post I made that explained it, choosing to concentrate on the parts I discussed that you didn't like rather than my explanations.

@Gill because you only need to look at the last few posts on every page to find the answer it's been said so many times. I've been here trying to help people since the new navigation bar dropped. What's frustrating is when you explain the hows and whys to someone who tells you they don't understand computers or its all too complicated for them in one sentence, and who will then argue back at you because they think they know best in the next one. I've lost count how many times this has happened.

The crux of the problem is that some people don't want things to change, and would rather complain and moan instead of helping themselves figure out these staggeringly simple changes.

God have mercy on whoever it is that has to do tech support for them at home.