Better discoverability needed search/reviews/user suggestions sorely needed.
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I've been subscribed for years for Bookworm alone and unless someone recommends another book here IRL I never read anything else on this site. A huge part of that is just how inconvenient the search page is (way too much pagination), and how difficult it is to tell if a novel is any good/suits my tastes.
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Even if a direct rating system isn't workable for some reason, some system that says 'users who liked this also liked this' or 'user suggestions' system would be great. It could even copy MAL and have users provide reasons why they suggest other novels and have the top voted ones appear.
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The series/search page on desktop also needs to show all novels, more details, and rough tags. Right now it's virtually unusable. Novels are split into 24 pages, and provide so little information figuring out what's worth reading would require opening 235 tabs. Have all items appear on the same page or 2-3 pre-loaded pages (so going to another page doesn't require reloading). Have some sort of more info modal or preview ch1 option too.
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Yeah a 'users who read x also read y' would probably be quite nice especially with new series
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@ssm1994 Thank you for posting your feedback! I just wanted to let you know that we are aware of this issue with our site and are devising a system that improves it, though you probably won't get everything you're specifically asking for in your post. We are working on other website projects at the moment, but keep an eye out later this year for changes!
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@ssm1994 Back when we were starting and had maybe, 50 series, discoverability really wasn't that big an issue. But now when we have 200+ series it's something we are having to rethink.
So I consider it a good problem to have (we have so much content it's hard to sift through!), but it's still something we need to work on. Better tagging, better filtering, a suggestion engine, new search result display options, perhaps a "browse titles" style page similar to the steam discovery queue... There are a lot of ways to tackle the problem.
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Even just allowing to order the list of novels by number of followers / readers would be a huge improvement imho and it would be something that could be added with little effort to the site.
Even without allowing to order the list by these numbers, just showing them on the results page / detail page would help a lot. -
@olee92 said in Better discoverability needed search/reviews/user suggestions sorely needed.:
Even just allowing to order the list of novels by number of followers / readers would be a huge improvement imho and it would be something that could be added with little effort to the site.
I agree it could be a nice improvement.
Speaking as a programmer, though, be careful about throwing around bits like 'could be added with little effort'. Depending on how the site backend is put together, it might be easy... or it might involve Rube Goldberg-esque contortions to get the 'number of follows' information into a space where it can be used by the 'sort series' code.
Even without allowing to order the list by these numbers, just showing them on the results page / detail page would help a lot.
Again, it depends on how easy it is to access that information from the appropriate pages.
Sometimes the backend design makes that easy. Sometimes it isn't.
