Home screen UX needs to be reverted

Feature Requests Website Features
#1

:spiral_notepad: Temporary solutions

  1. Style to fix the ordering: Home screen UX needs to be reverted - #38 by DarkPixlz
  2. UserScript to fix the lack of CCU: Home screen UX needs to be reverted - #23 by PoppyandNeivaarecute

I cannot believe this change went through, but here we are.

Recently, Roblox made the very poor decision to revamp the home screen. Not for the better though. They made the following changes

  • game tiles are now 16:9 and hide ccu and waste a lot of space on desktop
  • “todays picks” are at the very top
  • recommended are too

I’m asking for all of them to be reverted. Whoever signed off on this doesn’t know what they’re doing and all around this is a horrible design and a monumental waste of space.

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The homepage should be a homepage, not a rebranded “discover”.

Knowing how many of my friends have played a game is not useful information (cc Please Revert the "Friend Activity" Update). Just please always display the ccu and likes, and don’t hide vital information. Bring back Friends and Recently Played to the top and for that matter Favorites too. Recommendations suck, they don’t deserve that much real estate at the top for that matter.

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Even worse, the new “top picks” are right at the top. Why was this even a thought? First Favorites got shoved to the bottom and now recent games are second? The feed should be moved way off to the bottom and give us recent and saved/favorited games back at the top please.

ps: if the ux team is reading, please read up :slightly_smiling_face:

94 Likes
Player Count Changes on Experience Tiles
#2

Vouch. The home page is already a bloated mess, a travesty of UI and UX design due to poorly thought out and executed changes over the past 6 years. Having Discovery sorts on the home page was bad enough. This change removes THE most vital piece of info (how many people are playing). This change also replaced the organization of the Discovery sorts with some crappy “personalized” mess of games. And yeah, the tiles are too big for their own damn good. The fact that favorites is still on the bottom, under all this, and the barrier to scroll to it keeps getting larger, it’s almost as if Roblox doesn’t want you to see your favorited games.

At this point, they should probably just scrap every change made to in in the past 6 years and restart, because this is ridiculous.

Smh.

20 Likes
#3

Support. Like rating is not a good sole identifier of an engaging/popular experience because of like incentives & up-and-coming games not having an accurate ratio until they’re established. There’s also plenty of empty space in that design which shows that this is an intentional update to mislead players into playing unpopular experiences they otherwise wouldn’t be interested in playing.

Not to mention that this along with the friend activity update is especially bad as a developer because we can’t see our CCU at a glance in the event there’s an issue with our experiences.

16 Likes
#4

So, they removed icons. This is terrible. It’s like the new YouTube layout where all the videos are unnecessarily large.

14 Likes
#6

I just want to see the analytics before and after without any other confounding variables involved. I just want them to share the numbers.

I understand the idea behind removing it, but the loss of utility is just such a pain that unless the numbers are very significant, I don’t care for it.

13 Likes
#7

Disagree, removing CCU removes the subtle incentive to play more popular games and puts all games on an equal footing based on purely their thumbnail, now like % just needs to be removed.

9 Likes
#8

How so? It just makes it more annoying to tell how your own game is doing, and other reason why the CCU count existed in the first place.

11 Likes
#9

I don’t understand the vision here.

Wouldn’t it be better to have a variety of filters and tags so people can find more niche games how they want to and if they want to? And, Roblox is a company at the end of the day, they need to make money. Showing majority of popular games makes sense.

I mean, I’m all for smaller devs getting more of a chance -I mean heck, I am one-, but I don’t think this is the right way of going about it.

I can see your point, but we don’t have very many ways to actually find less popular games on Roblox alone. And, Roblox removing the CCU would make it harder to know if Roblox made a change to discovery when they don’t tell us, as they like to do.

Also, do we truly want “an equal footing”? If everyone had an equal chance to be on the front page, that wouldn’t be a very good front page to the majority of users, right? I guess then my question is, what does “an equal footing” mean to you?

I think society to be inherently unequal, no matter where or when you are. Would it not be better to fight for ‘equity’ and not ‘equality’?

I too see the flawed logic in this system. People can dislike bomb it, it could be an outdated rating, or people just got mad because they lost a game or something. There is a solution to this imo: a reviews system. People can recommend games, see when that person wrote that review, etc. (Steam does this well.)

Of course, there are issues with that system too, nothing is perfect. For example, to write a review, it would be wise to have an age restriction, spam filter, etc. in place.

My main point here is that we shouldn’t be taking things away without having a better replacement. These systems exist for a reason, even if flawed.

Anyways…

We need the Search & Discovery team at Roblox to actually listen to us. These feature requests are not working, as evident. I don’t hate these changes, I’d just like to know my voice is heard. And, I don’t feel that way.

9 Likes
#10

I do agree on that part, CCU counts should be visible on the main page for those who have edit access.

When I mean an equal footing I mean not inherently giving an advantage to the most popular games because they satisfy the biggest genre. I think only the best games should be shown, based on their stats (engagement, retention, revenue etc), if your game has terrible stats you shouldn’t be shown.

Agreed, a better rating system is sorely needed, however I don’t think it should show up on the main tile, only on the games page, as again it makes things more “fair” on the main discovery page for games that might be harder or played by a younger audiance that is more likely to dislike something.

Been asking for that for ages :pensive:

7 Likes
#11

By removing CCU as a primary stat, users are no longer turned off of low-CCU games at the point of discovery. Roblox can rely more on their algorithm to surface games with good statistics without focusing on the number of people playing. This encourages people to join these low-CCU games, and turn them into high-CCU games if those players find an engaging and fun experience. This promotes the growth of new experiences that deserve growth much stronger (in theory) than the previous system.

The loss of the CCU stat however is very hard to feel good about as a user.

17 Likes
#12

No. Even back then I called it a complete garbage idea:

I do agree here - Roblox ignores us way too much. The users often know better than Roblox does and we still get ignored regularly.

4 Likes
#13

You still get that information if you hover over the tiles or on the experience’s detail page. But yes, they should still show the CCU count in real-time too without having to do both.

It isn’t a major change, though. Just means you gotta hover now instead to view.

4 Likes
#14

@PeZsmistic’s explanation of it [the removal of CCU on the tiles] makes me feel like it’s not entirely a bad idea.

As long as the info is publicly available, when hovering over the ‘tile’ and in the details page, I’m fine with the CCU not showing up at first glance.

I am one person though. Roblox should do a poll to gain feedback after the change is given to everyone. If most like the change, we should keep it. Roblox has their own data, but I’d like a study that is entirely public; one where we can see how the study worked, come to our own conclusions, and acknowledge any faults of that study.

2 Likes
#15

I don’t think that’s how it will play out. What I think will end up happening is that players will join a game, or look at a game’s page, see there’s nobody playing, and leaving the game. This could even possibly hurt the retention stats for newer games.

5 Likes
#16

While I somewhat agree, it may be inconvenient if there’s some smaller games that you want to play that only have players online at certain given time.

2 Likes
#17

Got the update again. Please just revert this or add CCU back. I’m not sure who’s controlling this UX, but they’re not doing a very good job.

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7 Likes
#18

What are you using? Mine is just well:

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2 Likes
#19

In typical Roblox fashion, it’s an AB test. You might not have it.

3 Likes
#20

Bumping this, please Roblox, stop ignoring us. Somehow they’re managing to just ignore everybody totally here as usual which is not making me very happy to say the least.

5 Likes
#21

Is the CCU information not a mouse click away?
To me, it seems like a good change so players don’t brush off random games simply because they have 20 players instead of over 1K players.

6 Likes