SUMMARY In order to improve the experience of finding new interesting apps, the home page should list more categories. Currently, it's limited to only five (Most popular, Published and updated recently, Editor's choice, Games and Developer tools). Both Flathub and Snapcraft show many more categories that help users find new and interesting programs. Discover should strive to at least match the common ones between them. Examples from Flathub: Trending Popular New Updated Productivity Graphics and photography Audio and video Mobile apps Education Networking Games Developer tools Science System Utilities Snapcraft: Featured Development Games Social Productivity Utilities Music and audio Art and design Photo and video Server and cloud Books and reference Devices and IoT Education Entertainment Finance Health and fitness News and weather Personalization Science Security OBSERVED RESULT A lack of categories in the home page EXPECTED RESULT A bigger number of categories to stimulate users to find new interesting programs they wouldn't find otherwise
Discover has categories on the left side which provide more stuff, same as Flathub and the Snap store. Is there a reason why that's not good enough?
(In reply to Nate Graham from comment #1) > Discover has categories on the left side which provide more stuff, same as > Flathub and the Snap store. Is there a reason why that's not good enough? The home page has a different purpose than the sidebar. On most home pages, like Flathub, Snapcraft, App Store and Google Play, apps are usually laid out in a way to encourage exploration. It's the first thing the user sees, and they can immediately find apps they wouldn't otherwise find, without needing to interact or click on anything. There's an expectation that what shows up in the home page is a curated list of recommended apps, which in the case of Discover, even without privacy-invading algorithms, is done by showing the highest rated or most downloaded options. On the other hand, the sidebar has a different use case: it's usually used with intent, when the user is actively searching for something in a specific category, without relying on recommendations. To me, the best approach would be to show the highest rated apps of more categories, but, at the very least, if devs don't want categories in the home page, it would make more sense to remove the dev tools and games. It's odd to have those two random categories show up and nothing else.
I worry that if we add more categories to the home page, they'll be redundant with the categories shown in the sidebar. …Unless we add *different* categories to the home page, but then that just presents more choice and could, I fear, lead to choice overload. If we add any more categories to the homepage, I think we'd need to hide the sidebar until the user navigates elsewhere. But that would prevent the sidebar from being a global UI element that anchors the UI, as it currently is. I think this needs some design thought around this.
(In reply to Nate Graham from comment #3) > I worry that if we add more categories to the home page, they'll be > redundant with the categories shown in the sidebar. …Unless we add > *different* categories to the home page, but then that just presents more > choice and could, I fear, lead to choice overload. > > If we add any more categories to the homepage, I think we'd need to hide the > sidebar until the user navigates elsewhere. But that would prevent the > sidebar from being a global UI element that anchors the UI, as it currently > is. > > I think this needs some design thought around this. Personally I don't think it would be redundant because the home page would focus on recommendations. It could even, like, pick a set of 30 highest rated apps on each category and rotate them daily, showing a random selection of 8-10 from that pool. I do understand though if devs disagree. In that case, my alternative suggestion would be to get rid of the seemingly random games and dev tools categories on the home page (why those two when there are so many others?) and expand the number of apps shown for Most Popular/Published and updated recently/Editor's choice. They could show a rotated selection of like 10-15 apps each. Currently my Most Popular shows only 5 apps, Published and updated recently shows 8 and Editor's choice shows 9, and it's always the same apps every day. It makes the home page kinda useless because it always has the same suggestions. Increasing the number and rotating them would improve the discoverability of new, high quality apps. Whatever path devs and designers decide to take, the home page definitely needs some changes to become more dynamic and useful for Discovering (ha!) new programs.
> Personally I don't think it would be redundant because the home page would > focus on recommendations. It could even, like, pick a set of 30 highest > rated apps on each category and rotate them daily, showing a random > selection of 8-10 from that pool. I do understand though if devs disagree. This sounds like a lot of effort for not much benefit if I'm being honest. If I wanted to find the highest rated games, I'd click the 'games' category in the sidebar and then sort by rating? The same applies to any category in Discover. You can also search for specific apps. > In that case, my alternative suggestion would be to get rid of the seemingly > random games and dev tools categories on the home page (why those two when > there are so many others?) and expand the number of apps shown for Most > Popular/Published and updated recently/Editor's choice. They could show a > rotated selection of like 10-15 apps each. Currently my Most Popular shows > only 5 apps, Published and updated recently shows 8 and Editor's choice > shows 9, and it's always the same apps every day. It makes the home page > kinda useless because it always has the same suggestions. Increasing the > number and rotating them would improve the discoverability of new, high > quality apps. I suppose increasing the number of apps shown in each category on the home page might not be the *worst* idea in the world. But as for rotating them? I don't think it's really worth doing IMHO.
I tend to agree.