A redesign of a public library book review platform.
My RoleService Designer → Sole Designer – UX RedesignScopeReview Home and Article Pages – Desktop, 1440wMethodsHeuristic Evaluation, Comparative Analysis, Visual Design ExplorationToolsFigmaContextThe Booklist, Shingu Library Foundation. In-house JUL 2022 – JUL 2023, redesign 2026
A redesign that revisits the expert review section I managed at ‘The Booklist’, analysing the problems I had spotted but could not solve through the lenses of UI, UX, and web accessibility, and proposing how to resolve them.‘The Booklist’ is a library curation platform that brings together six services, including recommended reading lists, book reviews, and a librarians’ top-picks vote. I worked on one of them, Reviews for All, a section of in-depth reviews curated by subject specialists. I prototyped the early web and mobile screens in Figma, then over the following year designed the curation process around more than 26,000 purchase and loan records and edited and published 83 reviews.
The platform launched in a rush to meet the national library conference schedule, and a CMS was never built during my time there, so we ran it by hand-coding each piece of content (.jsp files plus source images) and passing it to the development team. There was never room to revisit the underlying structure. After leaving, I came back to the same screens as a user, analysed the problems I had not been able to solve, and proposed a redesign.
Reviews That Only Pile Up
The home screen was a single stream ordered by date. With no category entry points, a reader who wanted only social science reviews had no way to get there, and with no pagination or archive, reaching older reviews meant a scroll that only grew longer as the content piled up. Long reviews opened straight into text with no key visual, which made them hard to enter, and a weak visual hierarchy made them hard to scan.
Accessibility had broken down too. Label and quotation text fell below the WCAG AA threshold (4.5:1), and the book-classification and review-type labels were all set in the same colour and laid over cover images, so the category information was present but barely legible.
From Grid to List
The core way people browse reviews is to skim the titles and click. A grid let the cover images dominate the visual weight and get in the way of skimming, and it carried an operational cost as well: every cover had to be edited to fit a landscape crop. Moving to a list fixed the covers at a 3:4 ratio and placed the title and an excerpt along the natural reading path, so the key information became easy to scan.
The Librarian’s Colour Code
For the book-classification labels, I drew the colours from the visual convention of Korean Decimal Classification (KDC) colour labels. KDC has no officially assigned colours, but the convention of separating classes by colour is widely shared across public libraries and already familiar to librarians, the main users. It gave me a visual language grounded in a habit they already read fluently, rather than an arbitrary one.
I separated the two label types by form: review types (PICK1, Hidden Book, Focus) use the purple brand key colour to mark editorial curation, while the book classifications use outlined labels in a range of colours as secondary information.
Type for Reading
For the article page I set a restrained, type-led editorial tone in keeping with the nature of a review. The existing brand typeface (S-Core Dream), soft and rounded, suited a warm reading experience, so I kept it and organised it into a five-step scale. I held the body column to 691px (around 43 characters a line) to sit within a comfortable measure.
For quotations I used Maru Buri to create a contrast of typefaces, and gave the decorative quotation marks the book’s category colour, so each quotation acts as a visual comma in the flow of the text.
Reopening the Problem
Launching in a hurry left little time for the early design, and that taught me how much establishing a design system at the outset shapes the efficiency of everything that follows. This redesign worked within the brand guidelines (typeface and key colour) while meeting accessibility and readability standards, and at its heart was a single decision: to carry a visual language librarians already know (KDC) over into the digital interface.