Stax
A clean, simple book tracking app that does the essentials without excessive features.
Role
Design Engineering
Product
Mobile app
I love to read. I also love tracking what I read. I’ve tried book tracker apps like Goodreads and StoryGraph, but nothing could ever match the simplicity of a simple Google Sheet. Recommended titles and analytics are great, but I really wasn’t using these features. I wanted something that tracked and rated the books I’ve read, period. So I resorted to entering book information into cells, with tabs for each year, so I could track my favorites throughout the years. This also had its limitations, but for what I wanted most out of this, it was the best answer I had.
The problem
I wanted a simple app that would allow me to track and rate the books I’ve read. I needed to be able to find authors and titles, add books to my to-be-read list, and keep a log of what I’ve read throughout the years. Social features like seeing what friends are reading and setting up book clubs are nice-to-haves, but those will have to follow. What I really need right now is simplicity.
My role and constraints
Building an app for yourself is an interesting process. You are solely responsible for understanding the needs of the user (yourself), translating those needs into components, screens, and flows, designing with the user (yourself, again) in mind, and building the app. Iteration is also interesting - simply a process of tweaking features as I use the app. I’ve taken a little input from my wife, who is also a big reader, but mostly I’m building this app for myself to solve a specific problem that I was experiencing.
Process
Stax started as a scoped-down alternative to apps like Goodreads and StoryGraph — a simple way to track reading status, log half-star ratings, and get lightweight recommendations, without the social-network bloat. Early planning focused on a tight v1 feature set (search, ratings, reading statuses, notes) before expanding into a full social layer once the core experience felt right. Wireframes were built out for the friends list and friend-profile screens to establish the interaction patterns before development, which kept the build focused and gave a clear visual target to implement against.
