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You add a bunch of books to your shelf. Each of them is “private” by default (aNobii shouldn’t make an item public without your consent). But the overwhelming majority of the items are meant to be “public.” How can we make it easy to turn items from private into public?

So we made a box that showed all newly added items. With just one click all those with checkbox checked would be made public.

But public/private is just one of the attributes that can edited. How about letting users change other attributes en masse also?

So we added a link (clumsily-named “More options”) which, once clicked, opened a bigger box with more attributes. The result is the one on the left.

And it doesn’t look quite right.

Here’s the new one (the one on the right).

1. It is more apparent that the box is about editing, and that you can edit the items individually or “all together”.

2. There’s now a master control so you can change, say, the reading progress of all newly-added items, to “Finished” with just one click.

3. You can add a comment for each item right in the expanded box.

Thanks eudaemonian and dgnyhk for the suggestions!

On your “My Shelf” page, there’s this new link called “Shelf stats.” Click on it and you will see some interesting numbers about your shelf. Take a look!

We constantly look for ways to make it easier to add items to shelf.

A while ago, we asked ourselves, we have our entire order history here on this Amazon order summary page, can’t we add them all by feeding aNobii that page?

Or, what if we have this blog that has a page for category: books? Shouldn’t there be a way to add them all in a click of button?

So here you are, the new Import function.

Specs:

• Norah can import in one of the two ways: feeding aNobii with (1) URL or (2) HTML source code
• After Norah enters a valid URL, it will be saved and pre-entered the next time she comes to this page (like an “update” function)
• If Norah submits HTML instead, the input will NOT be saved for future use (pointless to submit the exact same HTML twice)
• If there are too many items on the submitted page, add some right away and add the rest while Norah browses around
• After the import has finished, Norah will see a result summary after page loads, if all books have been added right away. Otherwise, send the summary to Norah in a message

With all the productivity tools today, it’s not difficult for a small company to look bigger than it is.

aNobii is not small - it is TINY. We are two full-times that take care of UI design, copywriting, hardware setup, coding, user-testing, marketing, answering emails, writing cheques, completing government surveys, fending off door-to-door salesmen, and throwing out the trash. That means the demand for efficiency is high.

The implication of that is clear: bad decisions are EXPENSIVE.

Let me lay bare a bad decision I’ve made in hope of killing the demon that has haunted me ever since.

I once decided that we should play around with SMS, just because it sounded cool. I’d imagined letting users send wish lists to their phones in SMS so they don’t have to print out and carry them to the bookstores. It’d look good in an Ad, wouldn’t it?

So we spent time learning about SMS, deciding whether we should build our own server or use an outside service, trying out some APIs from a company whose servers kept crashing, figuring out how to prevent abuse so we wouldn’t bankrupt ourselves (our service is free but we have to pay telecom $ for each SMS). All in all, we’ve probably set the development back by half a month by working on this feature that wouldn’t be too useful yet for users looking for an app that lets user easily create, share, and explore booklists.

There are some more mistakes. That’s one of the most memorable.

With bad decisions this expensive, we are pressured to stay away from them. We have no choice but to review our decisions often and think extra-hard when we prioritize features and allocate time. And I’d say that turns out to be a good exercise for us.

A few days ago we made some changes so that when you invite friends you could attach your personal message. Shortly afterwards we’ve got several requests about saving current message for future use.

Those requests make sense (the reason we’ve missed this feature is we’ve blindly copied Gmail approach without thinking). Invitation is important to the growth of aNobii so we’ve made this update a high priority. It’s now done and you can see it in Invite a friend > Add a personal message

Our initial specs:
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Tom is a bookeater and loves aNobii. Every time he meets a new friend he’ll send that person an aNobii invitation. He thinks the default message does not nearly convey his enthusiasm for aNobii. He prefers to use his own personal message template. But he may decide to use the default message after all in some rare instances. You never know.

1. Tom can save the current personal message
2. If Tom has a saved personal message, he can choose to reuse and edit it
3. Tom can choose and edit the default message
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We decided that such a feature should not take the user more than one control. But it soon became apparent that we could not fit all three goals with just one control. So we decided to modify #1.

The result:
Every time Tom writes a personal message (submitted message different from default message), it will be automatically saved and will replace the previous copy. When Tom visits the invite page, he can decide, in one checkbox, whether to work with the default message or the most recent personal message.