Improve how suggestions and recommendations are presented
One of the ways that Software can transform the user experience is by advertising and suggesting the best apps that are available to install. Currently, Software does this in various ways:
- Featured apps: sets of 6 apps, picked from here, which rotate daily. Each has a banner on the front page.
- Editors picks: 6-8 apps (depending on the width of the grid), always shown on the front page, picked from a manually specified, distro-specific set¹.
- Recent releases (automatically generated, somehow)
- Recommended apps for specific categories: 6-8 apps (depending on the width of the grid) from the editor's picks¹, belonging to a specific category. We show two sets of these at any one time.
- Featured apps on category pages: 3 apps for each category, picked at random from the editor's picks¹.
Issues with this:
- Featured apps:
- There are only 12 of them
- Some of the set are typically pre-installed, which conflicts with the goal of suggesting things to install
- Editor's picks: the displayed set doesn't get automatically updated or refreshed
- "Recommended" sections are repeated on the home page; makes it feel uninteresting
- Category featured apps: the displayed set doesn't get automatically updated or refreshed
- Neither the featured apps nor the editor's picks data are actively maintained; there's a general problem with a small, static, set of apps being advertised
- There isn't much structure to the category pages - it's mostly a big grid, which isn't very engaging
- There is no personalisation of suggestions
I've recently done some design experiments for how to improve this situation. Changes include:
- Dropping the editor's picks data and expanding the set of featured apps
- Rotating the chunks of featured apps every 3 days, instead of every day (to stretch out the content we have)
- Mixing up the featured app chunks each time they're rotated
- New automatically generated sections on the home page:
- Global top rated (updated daily)
- New and updated from a category (selection should update daily, category should be changed every 3 days)
- Top rated from a category (selection should update daily, category should change every 3 days)
- "Lucky mix" (a pseudo-random selection, refreshed daily)
- A new, more dynamic page for each category, including featured apps, top rated, new & updated, and lucky mix sections for the category
Some of these changes could be made independently of one-another although, if we drop the editor's picks data, we will need some of the new sections to replace it.
One thing I've got in the mockups is half-width featured app banners. Do you think we can make our banners work for that, @jimmac?
¹ In Fedora's case, this is locally stored at /usr/share/app-info/xmls/fedora-popular.xml
; the source seems to have been lost somehow.
Edited by Allan Day