weread.com

I love reading books and its great if I can find a place where I can document/share my experiences. I was trying out weread.com. Their portable BookShelf (once you create your bookshelf you can carry it with you to orkut, facebook etc.) idea has generated a lot of traffic to the website, so it has a lot of users and content. But I am not entirely happy with the design of the website.

- When I sign in, I want to see a personalized home page. I want to see the books I have added, the reviews I have written, activities of my friends etc. The information on what general population is doing is secondary to me. Instead when I sign in, I see a page where a huge chunk of page is occupied by iReaders’ activities and there is no space for activities of my friends.

- I have already created a bookshelf. Why does the homepage still ask me to create a bookshelf after I sign in? Top quarter of the screen space is occupied by that, which is meaningless.

- There is no link to “Home”. But that is also because there is no homepage. I think that is bad design.

- Screen space seems to be poorly used in most webpages. There is a lot of content but the webpages are sparse which requires you to scroll a lot. Not cool. (A “An iReader has reviewed Blah Blah” takes 2 inches of screen space. I think that is unreasonable.)

I really want to use this website, but I get irritated when things are not intuitive or are cumbersome. I hope the weread.com people will read this blogpost. That is the only purpose to this post