A New Look for the Goodreads Homepage

Drumroll please...we’d like to introduce you to our new homepage! While it’s still in beta, we wanted to give you a chance to experience it for yourselves and let us know what you think.

Same great content, with books front-and-center

One of the most noticeable changes is that books are now the star of the page: we’ve increased the size of book covers and redesigned the updates feed to showcase books and provide more information about them.

“We wanted to encourage that feeling of serendipitous discovery you get when browsing the shelves of a library or your favorite bookstore,” says Seth Goldstein, Director of User Experience at Goodreads. “As you scroll, you’ll see books you’ve heard of but haven’t yet added to your to-read list, new books with tempting covers that make you want to peek inside, and books that your friend just fell in love with and can’t stop talking about.”

We also wanted everything that’s most important to your reading universe to be all in one place, so we’ve organized the page into three key areas:

It’s all about you

On the left side of the page, you’ll find everything about your reading:

Currently Reading. If you’re like many of us, you might have a few books that you’re reading at the same time. Now, you’ve got a beautiful visual reminder of what you’ve started reading, as well as a quick way to update your progress.

2016 Reading Challenge. If you’re one of the more than 2 million Goodreads members who have signed up for the 2016 Reading Challenge, you can quickly check your progress in this section. (And it’s not too late to sign up and set your yearly reading goal now!)

Want to Read. We show you the latest books you’ve added to your Want to Read list to help you pick your next book to read.

Find and discuss books with your friends

We’ve kept the updates feed in the center of the page, to keep the focus on your reading community:

New, more fluid scrolling. We’ve added continuous scrolling so you can keep going and going through your latest updates without any extra loading time and never miss an important update.

See who’s talking and jump into the discussion. We made it easier to see what your friends have to say about the books they’re reading, and to join in the discussion quickly. Don’t just read that great review of The Girl on the Train and scroll on – let your friend know what you thought of the characters and the ending!

More books, please!

If you can’t resist the temptation of more books (and we’d bet few Goodreads members can!), the right side of the homepage is for you. Here you’ll find:

Recommendations. Our recommendations engine analyzes 20 billion data points to come up with recommendations tailored just for you! Our goal here is to surprise you. We won’t point you to the latest bestsellers or to more books by authors you already love - you can find those easily yourself. We’re looking to uncover some hidden gems that other readers who have read similar books to you have also loved.

Editorial. Here we showcase the inspiring, creative, and thought-provoking blog posts by our Editorial team. Discovering a new book has never been so fun!

Plus, it’s faster

For those of you interested in the engineering work behind the new design, we chose the React framework to power the new UI, allowing us to make the page more responsive and faster to load than ever before, as well as providing our engineering team with the tools for building more high-quality interactive content.

Even if you’re not an engineer, you’ll notice that the new page loads much more quickly, the features are snappy to use, and the layout adapts to smaller computer screens and tablets.

Tell us what you think

With a community of more than 50 million members and growing, we’re always conscious of balancing design improvements with keeping things intuitive for our long-term members. We included hundreds of Goodreads members in the research and testing that helped us develop this design, and we’re excited about the early positive feedback we got from them about the new look. Now it’s your turn!

You can let us know what you think of the new page or report any issues you’re seeing by using the Feedback tab visible on the right edge of the page:

Also, if you’d like to switch back to the current homepage, you can follow this link in the new homepage footer:

You can always come back to the new homepage again by following the link in the current site footer here:

After you’ve had a chance to check it out and test out some of the new features, please take this survey and let us know what you think.

If you have more questions or would like to learn more about what’s on the beta page and what’s coming next, please visit this thread.

Looking forward to reading your feedback!

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