- UX/UI Design
- +
- Full-Stack Dev
Bookfinder
Time-saving web app that tracks thousands of online book listings.
Client
Freelance project for a Tokyo-based bookseller
Background
My client was spending countless hours searching for book titles online.
“I am always in search of several hundred titles,” they told me, “and find myself Googling these titles several times a week.” The manual process was both time-consuming and risky, as valuable finds easily slipped through the cracks.
Luckily, they found me. The task: build an app that tracks book listings and price changes across multiple sites and daily auctions.
Key Deliverables
- Bespoke UI designDesign
- Google Cloud Functions-powered back endDev
- Node.js scripts tailored to each target siteDev
- React front end using Tanstack Query, React RouterDev
Complex functionality; Simple UI
Each day, the app scans listings and compares them to past results, surfacing new or price-changed items.
While the app performs millions of comparisons to find these potentially valuable listings, the UI shows the results in a clean, quickly scannable format. Navigating between different days’ results and saving listings are also important features, designed to be as fast and intuitive as possible.
Making thousands of search queries easy to manage
My client needed to keep track of thousands of search queries across multiple sites — without getting lost in a sea of terms. I designed the UI to make finding, adding, and deleting terms fast and intuitive, placing tools where they were always within reach but never in the way.
Filtering and sorting? No problem.
With thousands of listings results and search terms, instant-feedback filtering and sorting were a necessity. Based on feedback from the client, I made these features accessible via the fewest clicks possible.
Analyzing search results
When your daily search performs over 20,000 network requests on a wide range of websites and APIs... things don’t always go as expected. The “Search results” view is a window into each search, providing meta data about every network request, time elapsed, and details about any errors that occurred.
Don’t forget dark mode
For a tool meant to be used on a daily basis, at any time of day, adjustable dark and light color schemes can be a welcome relief on the eyes — and laptop battery.