Home and Play Views

[kevincoleman]

Our discussion about the quickmatch finder has brought up something I’ve not been able to put my finger on for a bit: the functions and goals of the Home vs Play pages.

Several times recently I’ve found myself confused on which to click. If I want to play my currently active games I go to Play, right? Wrong. If I go to home I expect to see a general overview of what’s going on on OGS, right? Wrong.

Then enter our discussion about where a user should go to start a game, and it’s got the wheels turning.

Before I get any crazy ideas, can anyone provide clarity on what the goals are of the Play and Home pages?

The goal of the Home page is _____
The goal of the Play page is _____

It could just be a naming thing, or it could be a lack of direction—or heck, it could just be me. Thoughts appreciated!

[anoek]

Hearing you describe it, it's perhaps odd. Here's how we got to where we are:

Every site needs a home page right? Some starting place. Especially in the beginning, a very large fraction of our player base is correspondence players, and so it seemed natural that when you landed on the site the first thing you'd want to see was all of the games you were playing so you can make your moves. So that's the "Home" screen. Could be a better name would fit better, but then again people are used to the concept and name of "Home screen", as that's common vernacular so something needs to fill that spot.

Of course the other very common thing people want to do is start a new game, and all of the match making stuff, which started off with a seek graph system, which required a lot of real estate to make any sense of, needed it's own page. It probably would have been better named "Matchmaking" or something, but I went with "Play", maybe because it was shorter in length, or maybe just because that's what came to mind first and 10 years later it's still just kinda whatever I named it.

So that's the history of the nomenclature, and in short the functionality boils down to the need to display lots of ongoing games, and the need to to display lots of open games, and the separation of pages simply boils down to my inability to reconcile an interface that can do both of those things in a clear and clean way in one page.

[kevincoleman]

Ah! Thanks for the history of it. It does make more sense. I wonder if we could revisit the way it’s presented to help solve any confusion and/or to streamline the game creation process.

This is still just a vague idea, and I know it’s a heavily trafficked menu area, so we would want to consider all angles and test, but what if we made the Play page linked from a new “Start a Game” (blue?) button in the nav? That way it would feel more like an action item and less like a page to visit. This could be a pretty minor iteration at first if we had it replace the “Play” nav item. It would make it very apparent to new players that they can start a game quickly from anywhere.

[anoek]

As an initial impression kind of thing I think there's certainly some appeal to that look, however I do have some concern about the boldness of the button up there. I worry we'll get a bit of push back from the community with a bright blue button present in their games as it calls attention to it instead of the game their playing. I suppose one solution would be to set it to a more subtle gray color on game pages when you're one of the players, or something of the sort.

If we do end up with a button up there then I think the expectation would be that it would open a modal, rather than simply redirecting to the Play page or something.

I think it's certainly worth keeping in mind, but I would want to ensure it fit in with whatever holistic vision we settle on before committing to anything.

[kevincoleman]

I’m not sure I totally agree that it would distract from a game, as they’re in different areas and with different contexts, but I’m happy to differ on that. There’s plenty of room for a solution in between. Take for example this still-buttony button that’s not as big a block of color. This does reduce the ease of finding the button, but only marginally.

I tend to agree that we should try this button out with the modal.

Is this something we should try drafting up in dev/experimental? I’d be happy to try to make an initial PR for it.

[anoek]

Sure we can try it out on experimental. Do you have any thoughts on the modal?

[kevincoleman]

I think the most natural way to iterate would be to just use the whole content of the Play page in a modal. If we find that’s too clunky or something then we could try problem solving from there.

Huh. I think I see our first problem, though. Anything from that page that launched a modal now launches a second modal... hmm.

[shinuito]

Huh. I think I see our first problem, though. Anything from that page that launched a modal now launches a second modal... hmm.

Yeah generally I think less clicks will be appreciated in order to get a game over modal-ception.

One thing that really holds us back a bit in design I think, compared to lichess or chesscom is that we have so many time settings options. I think it's great to have these because I've played both fischer and byo-yomi games for instance in leagues on OGS, but also even canadian at one point for an online blitz tournament. So offering the options is great, but it does mean either one needs a lot of automatch button options (which may mean more queues), or one has this thing that we have now, where no-one really knows the time settings of the game going into the game, only that it's ~30s per move ish, or ~10s etc, or really how long the game might take.

Previous suggestions had essentially suggested kind of combining the home and play pages in some way, either you have tabs to swap between showing your own games, and showing automatch buttons or challenges or squash a bunch of things in.

Clossius put a nice bit of effort on some ideas in case you were interested in looking at them for inspiration or critique @kevincoleman

https://forums.online-go.com/t/new-landing-page-idea/46491?u=shinuito