Comments on: personal library managers

By: Tim

Tim — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 07:22:36 +0000

Hello. (LibraryThing guy.) I agree with you on the sign-up/in, so I removed it. You’ll find it has a much higher success rate now, using both Amazon and the LC and bouncing them off each other until it finds what you need. I’ve also added more social features, blog widgets, most of the usability fixes Stephen suggested. It’s not “done,” but it’s making a lot of progress. And it hit 20,000 books today, double what it was two days ago.

Tim

By: Dima

Dima — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 09:19:56 +0000

tangognat: Can you contact me by email? I want to find what causes your firefox login problem. For me it works flawlessly.

By: tangognat

tangognat — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 13:45:11 +0000

Hi Dima: After I do a search and pull up a list of Amazon results, I’d like there to be checkboxes so I can add multiple volumes at once OR l’d like to have the option of returning to the Amazon search results screen after I add one book from the list.
I’d also like some support for Firefox. I haven’t been able to login to reader2 from Firefox at all, and that’s my main browser.

Amanda: Finding titles in LibraryThing was tricky for me, and you’d already done some of the work for me in adding some of the titles from your collection. I also really like to see covers when I’m dealing with manga, so it was a little frustrating that sometimes the covers would appear in LibraryThing and sometimes they wouldn’t.

I like the idea of multi-language item support, I have a bunch of Japanese manga as well.

By: Amanda Robertson

Amanda Robertson — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 11:31:59 +0000

My main quibble with LibraryThing was the incredible difficulty I had finding titles to add. For 90% of the titles I cataloged, I had to enter them by hand - which meant there was no Amazon image (even though I had bought several of these books off Amazon and thus knew they were available) and no LC record. Often, the first volume of a manga would be available, but none of the others.

I was much more satisfied with Reader2 because of the relative ease of adding books, even though the screen for manual addition of books in LibraryThing was more robust. One thing I would want from it would be the ability to add foreign-language books in the same place; I have all of CLAMP’s Tokyo Babylon, for example, in the original Japanese, as well as some other random volumes of manga.

By: Dima

Dima — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 07:24:38 +0000

Adding books to Reader2 was written very fast and should be redone, it will be more user-friendly in several days
If you can describe in detail what you didn’t like in the service(s), I may add/change things in Reader2, cause I am a programmer, not UI/usability designer, and I desperately need feedback from users. So, if you want to, contact me by email.

By: tangognat

tangognat — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 03:46:33 +0000

I was mainly confused because it said that there was a one-step sign up/sign in, but the links made me think that it was a multistep process. The sign up/sign in worked fine once I figured out that the links were meaningless.

I think I was also not expecting the process to be that simple, I haven’t come across a login process that easy before.

By: Stefan Hayden

Stefan Hayden — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 03:32:42 +0000

While I agree the sign up and sign in links at the top right are very confusing I’m more interested in your confusion of the “One-step sign up / sign in”. From a web design perspective it’s such a great implementation. People spend so much time fill out useless forms to get access to sites that it’s a usability goal to reduce the time filling out forums.

I guess my question is if you is if you were confused because you are used to a more complicated forum system? Or just thought this implementation was poorly executed? I was in love with the sign up / sign in but then I’ve been reading about these problems for a long time.