Testing an Enhanced Discover Page: Top Charts and New Sorts

Updates Announcements
#1

[Update] November 8, 2024

[Update] August 26, 2024

Hi Creators,

Starting today, we will begin testing an updated Discover page to introduce top charts and additional new sorts, including but not limited to the following: Top Trending, Top Revisited and Fun with Friends. These sorts are not personalized, meaning everyone will see the same sorts and they’re based on statistics. Additionally, we’ll also start testing updated ways to highlight experiences through feature themed sorts and genre-specific sorts.

We will be testing across our phone, tablet and desktop apps, as well as on roblox.com. This test phase is crucial as we aim to learn and optimize Discover before a broader rollout.

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Note: This is an example order of sorts, and we will be testing a variety of sort titles and orders.

Why and What We’re Testing

Earlier this year, we shared our commitment to evolving the Discover page to better serve our community and provide more opportunities to surface diverse recommendations to our users. We want Discover to be representative of a zeitgeist of fresh, high-quality experiences based on these three guiding principles:

  • Freshness: Measures how much the top 10 experiences of a sort overlap compared to previous weeks, averaged over 4 weeks
  • Whole page uniqueness: Measures how many unique experiences a sort contributes to the whole page out of its top 10 experiences
  • Quality: We apply safety filters, Daily Active User (DAU) thresholds and other signals to select qualified experiences

Based on a recent user study on content discovery, we learned that more than 40% of surveyed users use external sites like YouTube or TikTok to find out about new experiences on Roblox, and 30% use the Discover page. However, in reality we find the Discover page actually attracts less than 5% of overall traffic today due to a lack of fresh content. With this refresh, we are introducing top and trending sorts, with the aim of transforming the Discover page into a more impactful and dynamic space that delights users.

How This Affects Creators

We see these upcoming updates to the Discover page as an exciting opportunity for ideal audiences to find your experience.

To help understand the selection logic for each new sort featured, we will use a tool tip near the sort title to explain in simple terms why the experiences surfaced.

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Additionally, the tests will bring about two updated ways for your experiences to be highlighted:

Feature themed sorts

We want to reward the significant time and energy you have invested to adopt APIs and features like Chat with Voice by showcasing your experience in improved feature themed sorts. Your experiences will be automatically eligible to be selected in these sorts if you enable the feature in your experience.

Genre-specific sorts

We’ve heard your feedback that you want to have more genre representation available. There is still quite a bit of work to be done to fully deliver value in this area. As a step in the right direction, you will now see representation of trending experiences in new genres (in addition to existing ones), which is intended to reward you for contributing to new genre development by giving your experience audience impressions early on.

This experiment is designed to help us learn more about how Roblox users respond to genres, so we are using genres assigned from consensus-based human evaluators. In the near future, we plan to remove the existing, out-dated genre selector in the Studio publishing flow. We’ll use what we learn from these experiments to replace genre selection with something much more relevant and supportive for creators.

What’s Next

This test marks a significant step toward enhancing the Discover page to better meet the needs of our community and broaden the range of recommended experiences. We plan to continue experimenting with new layouts and functionalities, such as additional filtering by country, age, gender and device with these settings pre-loaded for each user.

We are eager to see your feedback and hope you share our excitement for these improvements. Stay tuned for future updates, and please reach out with any questions you might have.

Thank you for your creativity and commitment!

FAQ

What’s the difference between the current Discover page and the newly enhanced Discover page?

  • The enhanced Discover page will offer non-personalized, fresh, diverse, high-quality experience sorts.

What are examples of new sorts that you will be testing?

  • We will be testing a number of new sorts including but not limited to the following: Top Trending, Top Revisited and Fun with Friends.

Will all users see the same content or is it personalized?

  • This new Discover page will have a consistent and non-personalized set of sorts, ensuring that all users see the same content.

Why are you planning to take the genre selector away in Roblox Studio?

  • During this experiment, creator-selected genres won’t be used, as the genres in that selector have gone stale. Instead, we’re using consensus-based human evaluation to assign a genre and maintain quality. We will be using this test to build perspective on how to re-introduce a relevant genre selector for creators.

Is my experience eligible if it is not on all platforms?

  • Yes, your experiences will be eligible even if they aren’t available on all platforms. However, we will only feature your experience in a sort to users when they are using a compatible device.

Is my experience eligible if it is not rated “All Ages”?

  • Yes, experiences of all age ratings are eligible.

What order will users see sorts in?

  • We will be testing a variety of sort orders across different test groups.
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#2

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#3

:sparkles: This is a really good update! :star: :ocean:

I really do hope this can promote more underrated & fresh experiences to popularity.

  • Are there any plans on making 16:9 appear in Discover & will they have their CCU shown?

Thank you.

36 Likes
#4

I’m very excited specifically by that tool top explaining the sort - knowing how it works even partially is huge! I’m looking forward to this.

26 Likes
#6

In regards to discovery, I recommend a curated or un-curated list of games that haven’t reached popularity just yet.
Like seriously, All these section are practically games with up to 2k players, “Up and coming” has games that are already popular. It doesn’t feel like an up and coming category
Do not let popularity be the main strive for this category, AND income. It can be a category of games that reach a point of popularity like 150/500, Once it goes out of that range it gets removed from that category.

And I’m on my knees for this. Add genre filters back. There was no clear explicit reason why this feature was removed, and it was unjustified to have such a useful feature that which We have categories for games will be insanely helpful. Bring that back, and so. Improve on that idea to add more specific types within those genres. The whole Roblox website has tons of variety within it and it requires something like this back. Maybe make it part of the surveys which moderators can check in and validate these.

47 Likes
#7

This. Having insight into how these sorts work is a HUGE step in the right direction for the Discover page and it can’t be overstated how great of a UX feature this is for developers. Thank you, Roblox!

14 Likes
#8

This is not the long-term solution, but I see how this can be helpful before making something bigger. It is more user facing with the additional information. I commend that. That said, a lot more can be done in the user-facing side of things (Filters plz).

I wonder what these features entail. Voice chat makes sense as people would actively want to seek that, I think. But, players aren’t really drawn to HapticFeedback in the same way.

10 Likes
#9

I wonder how the new genre system will work. Human verificators seems like a lot of work, that will overlook smaller experiences.
I don’t understand what is wrong with the current genre system? I use it in my Game Discovery Hub, and they work very well.
There are some new genres that should be added though

10 Likes
#10

Human validators as in people that will check surveys given by the creators.

Again this is the direction we might have to go to so that games that give Roblox a bad wrap don’t get recommended from the sea of slop, They have to go through quality standards like the Age rating survey.

So genre filtering may be part of the survey feature which could be useful

9 Likes
#11

For increasing discoverability + leveraging statistics to create a uniform display, are there any plans to integrate top charts for genres (and also, edit the existing genre selection?)

For example: I think it’d be awesome to see further updates in the vein, listing top roleplay places, but with the specificity of getting into: Historical Roleplay, Alternate History Roleplay, Magic Roleplay, etc.

8 Likes
#12

Pretty unexpected to see algorithms that are as advanced in personal data collecting as it can be this time of day – be utilized in a way to not propose the most personal preferences, but rather the preferences of the whole platform.

I do already have a raising doubt that one (or more) categories will be consecutively dominated by a select few games. If that is the case, I hope there is some variable that gives other and/or newer games a chance to be featured higher up in these categories too.

11 Likes
#13

Nice update, but can I have the continue tab back on top in home page plz?

17 Likes
#14

Turns out listening and engaging with creators leads to a level of trust and respect between and us and roblox, who knew! Thanks to the discover team for the increased transparency, much appreciated.

If only other teams could do the same… UGC

9 Likes
#15

I’ve been in the beta program testing this for the past few days and can definitely confirm it is a significant improvement from the previous system which was completely unusable.

Most of the biggest complaints I had against the discover page have been fixed (and I really appreciate the new tool-tips with info on all the sorts). I think there is still room to grow but this is definitely a solid start.

8 Likes
#17

Does this mean that all categories will require the use of new and beta Roblox features to be selected into the sorts?

7 Likes
#18

does this mean we will finally stop getting repeats of front page games? that would be immensely helpful towards discoverability! will this also apply to event (handpicked) sorts or not?

7 Likes
#19

long story short, simulators are the main reason here. back when there were literally thousands of them, they would predatorily abuse information, tags, etc. just to get their cheap copy-paste game into the front page. im not saying im against the genre filters coming back, but misuse of genres is mainly the reason it was removed in the first place.

14 Likes
#20

Is there no way for genres to be a crowdsourcing mechanic like Steam? I understand how some creators might abuse genres to promote their game in other genre lists, but user-defined tags in Steam work very well as a product of crowdsourcing data.

12 Likes
#22

We want genre sorting button back!!!

10 Likes
#23

No wayyyy?

Excited to see what this shall bring us!
I’d love to see some good improvements to game genres, sorting and recommendations.

Is the front page finally getting the long-awaited upgrade it needed?
I feel like only time can tell really but it looks very promising.

I do hope to see better genre filtering soon, it helps a lot with finding games I find interesting.

3 Likes