Quick links: ui designs, public link to this very design doc

Better Book Base is a project that will be written in React with Next.js that aims to provide a book rating website with a clearer, more flexible, more reliable rating system than that which exists today (such as the simple 5 star system on GoodReads or the moods system on Storygraph). This outline design/planning doc will help guide the development process and define the project's scope and goals.

Problem Statements:

  1. Presently, I feel really restricted by just giving 1-5 star rating on GoodReads when many times two books can’t really be compared. How can I judge a piece of feelgood fluff that I read just to escape for a while on the same scale as a work of hardcore speculative fiction designed to challenge your world view? In addition to other metrics, Better Book Base will allow you to separate your books into “Weight Classes” first, so that you can rate your fluff reads against your fluff reads, and so on.
  2. Presently, I don’t know how to trust the global ratings I see people giving to other books. Often I find that I really do not enjoy a book which has a super high rating, simply because I have different taste. How can I trust what other people are saying? Better Book Base will (eventually) allow users to sort global ratings based on user ratings for other books*.* For example, let’s say there is a user, Talia, who really loves The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin, and Talia wants to know if they will like Up Jumps the Devil by Michael Poore. Talia can visit the page for Up Jumps the Devil which will immediately give you the raw global average rating. Then, they can open the dropdown called “Show Better Book™️ Rating Based on…” and select a different book from their own list of rated books to generate a custom average; we will say Talia selects The Lathe of Heaven. B3 will then show the average rating for Up Jumps the Devil using only data from users who rated The Lathe of Heaven highly.

Project Overview

The goal of Better Book Base is to create a robust and extensible platform for managing and displaying your own book ratings and getting insight into your reading preferences with graphs. In further iterations of the project, interaction with other site users and broad scale information about how people typically rate specific books will be made available. The project will be developed in iterations, with each iteration introducing new features and improvement

MILESTONE V1:

The first iteration of the project will focus on the core functionality and basic features.

User Stories:

Routes: