I hate the new homepage, please allow us to customise it.
4 Likes
Okay, so here’s the pros and cons:
Pros:
- New friend circles that show who’s currently playing on the game tiles are nice.
Cons:
- No categories, so it looks and feels very messy.
- There are 12 entire rows of games. Why are there more games on the home page than on the Games page?
- The activity feed, bless its heart, has been completely buried by this. You have to go so far down to see it now.
8 Likes
I just want to add how insane this is.
6 Likes
Hey – thanks for all the feedback. This is a feature we are testing, as we continue to iterate on the overall Roblox app.
The goals of this test are:
- to show a better visualization of which friends are playing which games
- keep easy access to your most recent and favorite games
- explore a unified list that shows a flexible mix of recent, favorite and recommended games
We will be testing different ordering, and will continue to adapt the layout short-term and long-term. Based on some of your feedback, we probably need to cap the number of friends’ games so it doesn’t push everything too far down, and try making the overall length of the list shorter. I also get it that you want better shortcuts or filters or sections to see only your recents/favorites/etc.
Long term, we want to have a version of the game card that can show friends playing as well as the game stats so no information is lost, as UnderMyWheel suggested. I also like the suggestions here around how to improve the feed section.
Finally, we’ve already caught a bug or two that made non-relevant or non-playable games end up at the top of the page. If you feel like this is happening to you, please post a screenshot and say which games in your list just seemed “wrong”. If we’re not showing good, relevant games in the list, then this feature is not working as intended.
Thanks,
Sisteralligator
12 Likes
- keep easy access to your most recent and favorite games
You cannot abide by this point while also attempting the following:
- explore a unified list that shows a flexible mix of recent, favorite and recommended games
Mashing every category of game that had been on the home page into one unsorted list is confusing, hard to keep track of, and introduces an extra step where the website tries to predict what we want to see. Why introduce a system that tries to predict what players want to see when we already had everything we wanted to see in an easy-to-sort-through format utilizing categories? The ideas behind this change seem like a solution in search of a nonexistent problem and completely unnecessary. It only degrades site functionality because this aspect of the page already did its job perfectly previously.
I like the idea of displaying who’s been playing what games in the friend activity sort, but I really do not want that to come at a cost of losing our ability to see the ratings and player count of that game.
In short, adding extra hoops for us to jump through in order to view information we already had cohesive, organized access to just for the sake of adding an interest prediction system is extremely annoying for the end user.
Thanks for listening to our feedback!
15 Likes
Exploration is fine, and Roblox is all about that. But this exploration has virtually unanimous disapproval from the developer community. At what point will the exploration stop when developers are saying it’s gone too far? Will data such as visits / load-time of the homepage be taken into account?
I think it’s also fair to say, this is the bullet point where I think most developers here disagree with the feature.
Draw the mixed list idea to the extreme, imagine if the entire games page was nothing but a mix of all the games from all the sorts.
We want order, not chaos
Recently played, Favorited, Friend activity.
Games belong in sorts.
8 Likes
Firstly thanks for responding.
To add on from above, it might be a better idea to allow the ability to customise the home page to make it better fit. For some users, they may want it like this, for others they may want it with more order.
1 Like
Customization is great, but we need to have good defaults for the majority of the platform anyway. Better to fix problems outright instead of adding settings to disable/change, if possible.
Of course
I think what has been said before is good and I want to add more stuff to improve the UX
I play the same game every day (Bee Swarm Simulator), but because of how the homepage is sorted, I have to scroll and skim through the tiles to find it.
As for solutions… Take YouTube’s homepage as an example. Their homepage is all about discovery;
subscriptions’ latest videos at the top, followed by 10 recommended video tiles, followed by a bunch of different random but relevant categories of videos.
Translating that into Roblox…
Recently played games mixed with recently updated favourited/followed games at the top, followed by games your friends are playing mixed in with games they were playing (basically a “social” recommendation sort), followed by everything else.
I would also add context to differentiate these sorts, because my belief is that some players might be more likely to play a game knowing that one of their friends have already played it (do a test to confirm this assumption).
2 Likes
As a developer, I find the new home page sort to be somewhat irrelevant to my interests.
I use the homepage as a quick jumping point to get to the games I am working on. The “most recent” games was the first tiles widget on my homepage and I liked it that way, as I could quickly access games I am working on.
This new sort is all sorts of random noise to me and makes me frustrated.
I cannot easily customize the game tiles to my liking using ublock to block unwanted categories. I can tell the most recently played games category is the 3rd row down, but there’s no way for me to right click on the frames of the rows above so I can make it stay at the top.
The studio baseplate template shows up on the top row. Now, I know some friends who would publish cool content and not make a game icon, but I am frustrated that I am forced to click through to see that it’s actually nothing of value.
Also, there are too many games on the homepage now. The feed and blog posts have become non-entities to me because of how much time I have to spend scrolling to get to them. I don’t really feel any need to re-visit my 50th last-visited place.
I miss seeing the favorites. I kept tabs of games I have a vested interest in, but did not necessarily play, using that.
The old categories gave me an at-a-glance way to get to the games I am working on and see what my friends are up to without having to spend much effort hunting for things and I could see what my friends and groups are saying.
10 Likes
FYI - We are planning to start another short test on the homepage. This will go out to a smaller % of users than before, and incorporates many of your feedback points.
- The long games list will be much shorter
- Recent games will be higher up in the list
- Friends’ studio games should no longer appear
- Existing home page sorts are not going away, they are below the long game list.
Thanks for your feedback as we continue iterating on the home page.
1 Like
Gosh darn I was in the smaller %. Now I need to search for my own game on the home page, who would have known. Recent and favorites should not be below a random slew of games I don’t want to play.
This belongs on the games page, not my home page. Get these random games off my home page rreeeeee
5 Likes
I think it would be much more cleaner if there was a row called “Recommended” that lists games based on the criteria of your favorites, games you have liked, and games you follow. The row should have the scrollers like the rows on games page have so that you can scroll through more games without having to take up so much room height wise.
I love the idea of showing which friends are playing which game by putting them on the cards, but I think it would work better if your friends were put at the bottom right of the game icon so that information such as the current player count and like percentage isn’t blocked.
Why is this? Can they be placed above as they’re the most useful part of the homepage?
4 Likes
Displacing useful, relevant information and cluttering up the home page for a machine prediction system that’s redundant to the actual games page and less effective is really not what the home page needs.
2 Likes
I’m not seeing this, and I’m frankly glad that I don’t see this, or at least don’t see this on my tablet at the moment. I can see this being very annoying and cluttered.
1 Like
Machine learning algorithms are not a replacement for useful information. The cluttered jumble of games, if made to stay, should absolutely be placed below the categories, not prioritized.
8 Likes
Having the games my friends are currently playing is fine IMO, but I agree with others in that the rest don’t belong on the home page. Games my friends have played (i.e. not currently playing) belong on Games page – not the Home page. The Home page shouldn’t be a mini Games page. If the goal is to get players into games more quickly, then add a “Play Games” CTA on the Home page.
6 Likes
I don’t care if you add recommended games to the home page (in fact I love it) but does it really have to be so long?
One row is more than enough.
5 Likes