GR has announced a Book Page Design Change

[Empress, Seeker of wonders]

Emily had just posted the latest announcement about the new change in the book page design. [see below for the original message and a screenshot].

Not all books will have the change yet, as Goodreads takes it's time when caching the pages.

Emily wrote: "We’ve recently been working on how to better present the Community Reviews section of the book page. One of our design challenges was reviews or ratings without text. They weren’t displayed in an appealing way, and frankly weren’t that helpful to scroll through - they were taking up a lot of real estate in this section. So, our design and development teams have come up with a way to condense them and make them more interesting. We’re rolling it out today. Here's a screenshot of the changes:



One important thing to note is that these changes only apply to the Community Reviews section of the book page. Your Friend Reviews will still appear the same way, as you’re more likely to be interested in your friends’ details. We hope that this change will provide more useful and interesting information on the book page.

Of course, if you’d like to see the review page for any particular rating or “to-read”, you can still do so. Just click “rated it” or “marked it.” These now function as links to take you to the review page.

We’ll keep you updated as we work on improving the book page!
"

[Empress, Seeker of wonders]

Tullia wrote: "Thanks for the heads-up, Ellie. I saw a few pages like this yesterday. I think it's a good change."

I like the design change, but I disagree with it from a practical side.

The new design hides a lot of information that used to be visible on the book page.

One example:

Recently Goodreads removed the genre/shelf box from books that haven't been shelved enough times, so if you want to see how other people have shelved it (something I do for various reasons) you had to scroll through the pages of non-text reviews. Since those non-text reviews displayed the shelves, the box was considered as a duplicative information.
See the exact explanation here: "Removing the shelves box was a design decision because it was seen to be duplicative. On books with few reviews, the shelving activity is already pretty visible in the Community Reviews section."

Well now with the new design those shelves are not visible, and we don't have the shelf box as well, so good luck in finding all the information you might need for a new and not popular book.

The date someone added a book is also not visible.

For me this is the another change that decreases GR functionality.

[Jackie - Fire & Ice Book Reviews]

I agree it is a good change, but I liked looking at some of those details.