One social media-driven website that I like is aNobii. aNobii is a social media site designed for book enthusiasts all over the world. Users can create and share their reviews, see recommendations, join groups, and find friends and “neighbors” with similar tastes in books.
From the get-go, I liked aNobii’s simple layout. They have a no fuss GUI, which I find simple and easy to navigate. After I had gone through the prerequisite sign up, I was navigated to a “lets get started page.” I found this page simple and straightforward. In contrast to other communities I have joined, their set up was simple and only focused on the most important things; in their case, building the user’s shelf.
One has the option of importing from their Amazon account or an external database such as an excel spreadsheet, but I chose to add books to my shelf manually. After clicking the “Add your first book (in a breeze)” button I found myself at a search page which was, once again, no fuss and simple to use. After each search I did for a book, a list of books would appear with an easy “add to bookshelf button.”
Within minutes, I had added six of my favorite books to my shelf and I was ready to roll. Much to my delight, I found their “my shelf” homepage attractive and easy to read and navigate. Unlike Facebook whose concept of a “wall” was a bit abstract and had no intuitive connection to its actual function (at least to me) aNobii’s visual representation of an actual “shelf” made the concept easy to understand. Like most social-media sites, they offered integration with Twitter and/or facebook. However, unlike some other sites I have had the misfortune of using, I had my twitter feed set up in a manner of minutes and was easily able to do so.
For all the good things about aNobii, there was one major flaw with their design that definitely detracted from my experience over all. When one goes to rate a book, they repeat their buttons twice. Due to their design, I wasn’t clear exactly what I was meant to do or which buttons I was meant to push.
Moreover, from this page, it is not clear how one is meant to navigate back to the main page. These are the kind of pages that particularly frustrate me. There is only one simple function, in this case, rating a book, but due to design flaws, one becomes frustrated and confused. Also, not being able to navigate back to the main page without using the “back button” is a major annoyance of mine. aNobii was relatively consistent in that area, but in this page, they definitely failed the test.
Overall, I was happy with the usability of aNobbi. The pages were linked intuitively, the design was simple, and the overall webpage was easy to understand and use. For an average skilled computer user and book lover, I recommend it.
