A big redesign at The Hawaii Project

I’ve just pushed live a pretty major update to the user interface and visual design for The Hawaii Project. (Thanks to Jim Fell for his visual mockup that drove most of the changes to the design. His conversations were immensely helpful. All mistakes and ugliness are, of course, mine.)

As a reminder, The Hawaii Project brings you books and book news you’d never have found on your own. We track what the web’s leading tastemakers and book reviewers are writing about, uncovering things that match your favorite authors, personal interests and current events, and bring them to you daily. 10% of our revenue goes to support 3 great literacy non-profits.

I had a few main goals with the redesign:

• Communicating that the books in The Hawaii Project are discovered by extracting which books trend-setting publications are writing about, and matching them to your interests.
• Moving to a more modern visual style.
• Removing much of the “UI” clutter.

The Hawaii Project works by scanning almost a thousand high quality web sources of writing about books. Everything from The New York Times book reviews to author blogs to niche blogs about special topics, like espionage books, politics or medieval history. It was clear people weren’t getting that, nor were they really aware there were “stories” at all in the system. That is a key differentiator, so it needed to become more obvious.

I radically simplified the Navigation bar so that “Books” and “Stories” were prominent, and introduced a “Recent Stories” panel into the Books page – showing images and snippets from a few stories, as well as highlighting the source of story via text and a logo, with a rollover highlight on the book mentioned in the story.

In moving to a more modern visual style, I wanted (needed!) to get rid of the many distractions and overly ornate visual elements in the existing design. The inspiration for The Hawaii Project was about that feeling of sitting on the beach reading a great book. The visual design tried to capture that with colors from the water, sand and palm trees, but the pages had 2 and sometimes 3 competing gradients (and heavy gradients at that). It wasn’t working.

Here’s the previous design for the Books page and the Book page:

The new design removes virtually all gradients, gets rid of the heavy greens and brown colors, moves to a more typical grey background and black text, simplifies the number of fonts and font-sizes used in the design. It’s far easier on the eyes and much more readily scanned.

Much UI clutter has been removed or hidden. The Navigation bar at top gets a new background image that’s more clearly beach-related, removes a number of extraneous items, and simplifies down to a simple choice of Books | Stories | Following, emulating Flipboard, Pinterest, Medium and the like, and makes clearer what the primary actions are: See Books, Read Stories, or Follow Sources and Authors to get more relevant information. User Account actions (customization, login, list maintenance, etc) are moved to a simplied User drop down (the silhouette menu). The User menu and Search are moved to the top right to get them out of the way.

On the books page, various means of finding an actual copy of the book (OpenLibrary, Scribd, your local library, and so on) are moved to a dropdown, so they’re easily available but out of the way. Secondary metadata about a book (Editions, Categories) are hidden away in containers that can be opened as desired. Stories about a book get more visual play with the introduction of images as a splash of color to draw your eye to them.

Related Books, and the Author’s other books, are moved to the bottom of the page; they can be scrolled to as needed but don’t distract you on first page load.

Here’s the final designs as they are in production today:

Alan Furst is the master of the historical spy novel, particularly the era just before World War II erupts. In Spies of the Balkans, he takes on, well, the Balkans.

The Hawaii Project

The Hawaii Project – personalized book recommendations

Costa Zannis is a Greek policeman, with his finger on the pulse of the underground in the port city of Salonika, Greece. Soon he’s in a romance, and involved with spies. With the German Army marshaling on the border, …. Alan Furst does his thing. Which is showing you the looming menace of Germany and the wholesale destruction of WWII, in an historically and geographically accurate way. Always good fun.

I’ve actually met Mr. Furst at a book signing. He’s polite, self-effacing, and incredibly knowledgeable about this era of history. Do yourself and him a favor and buy this book, although if you’ve not read him before, you might consider starting with Night Soldiers or one of this earlier works.

Tl/DR: If you liked Gorky Park or anything by Martin Cruz Smith, read Child 44.

Leo Demidov is an idealistic state security officer in 1950s Stalinist Russia. He dotes on his wife, (mostly) believes his work supporting the State is really in the best interests of everyone. His job investigating crimes is really only complicated by the State’s insistence that because they live in the worker’s paradise, there aren’t any crimes. When Leo continues to investigate what appears to be a serial killing, when his superiors have declared the case closed, everything he believes will be challenged.

http://www.thehawaiiproject.com/book/Child-44-%28The-Child-44-Trilogy%29–by–Tom-Rob-Smith–60673

What I found most compelling about Child 44, and what made it more than simply a run of the mill thriller set in communist Russia, was the way Smith evoked the uncertainty and terror of living in a world where every friend would betray you to the state because they had to, to save their loved ones, or a world in which to simply be charged was to be proven guilty and sent to a camp or Gulag, most likely to die.

Leo is no Arkady Renko, able to deduce the most difficult conclusions from the faintest of evidence – he’s more of a plodding, not-giving-up-til-I-get it kind of detective. But there are sufficient similarities to Cruz’s works, that if you like them, you’ll enjoy this.