I was reading novels on Wuxiaworld one night when I saw an announcement about how they were re-hauling the entire site so I reached out to the team asking to help.
Wuxiaworld is the largest Chinese-to-English novel translation platform in the world. It is ranked by Alexa as one of the top 2000 websites, and with millions of page views per day, Wuxiaworld has become a brand name in Chinese-to-English novel translation excellence.
This revamp aimed to streamline navigation, improve accessibility, and refresh the overall user experience, ensuring Wuxiaworld remains a premier destination for novel enthusiasts worldwide.
The original site was slowly built through feature upgrades based off the different needs they had as they grew over the years. Although there was no major issues with the basic goal of reading novels, there were major usability issues.
People want recommendations
There isn't a clear recommendation system where new users can refer to and new users are feeling quite lost when they land on the site for the first time.
The payment system is confusing
Wuxiaworld had multiple payment systems to cater to all the request of the different stakeholders but they did not have a clear way of explaining all these systems to new customers.
Users just want to a way to read conveniently
After speaking with the users, we gathered feedback that the users read in many different situations, on the go, in bed, on their desktop, etc. The one common thing that everyone agreed on was that they wanted the reading experience to be seamless.
I conducted a stakeholder interview with the CEO of Wuxiaworld and learned about the business goals. Despite being a user of the site for many years, I never saw the site from the business point of view and these stakeholder interviews were very important in helping to define a north star for our MVP.I also took a look at various competitor novel sites to see how it could inspire elements in the new site.
After each week, we would have meetings with the stakeholders to get their input and identify areas of improvement. As the team was located all over the world, we were all working remotely and it was important for us to do a weekly catch up.
Wuxiaworld is first and foremost a reading app, so we decided to simplify things and dial down on that, We added multiple modes of brightness for readers so that they could read comfortably in any scenario. We also made the UI more minimalistic to focus more on the stories, including the use of colour.
For less confusion, we decided to have 2 payment systems, cash and an in-store currency to encourage readers with promotions and events. We also added a recommendation system to the homepage and individual novels. Readers can look through "Popular Novels" or "Similar Novels" to find recommendations.
Wuxiaworld is first and foremost a reading app, so we decided to simplify things and dial down on that, We added multiple modes of brightness for readers so that they could read comfortably in any scenario. We also made the UI more minimalistic to focus more on the stories, including the use of colour.
To maintain consistency and facilitate the handover from design to dev, I established a flexible design system based on reusable components and their states such as cards, list items, and controls. Each component can be shuffled and combined with the others while maintaining design consistency.
The design system helped to improve efficiency during the design process and also ensured that the site could continue to evolve while maintaining visual consistency.
