I know, this is meta…
Product Hunt has changed quite a bit since it started as an email digest just over two years ago. Today, we’re introducing another big update — a more personalized and simplified ProductHunt.com.
If you login, you’ll see a personalized feed, highlighting things upvoted and posted by those you follow. Your Product Hunt will look different than mine.
We’re also moving away from the horizontal scroll. We tried it, but it’s become clear that most of you prefer the simple vertical feed.
Thanks to everyone that provided feedback on the new Product Hunt during the beta period (and for keeping it on the DL 🙊). I wrote more about the update on Medium if interested. Eager to hear everyone’s ideas!
@rrhoover I love the idea about a personalized feed and simple vertical feed.
I'm still not completely sold on the way you display product-pages - I'm talking about the low-opacity backgrund that follows every product-page. Maybe it's just my personal preference... That said, PH remains one of my favorite sites and your Chrome Extension is super handy!
Keep it up!
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@rrhoover Love the new design already, was never sure about the carousel homepage... I hope this sticks! DId you find the carousel have a negative effect on your usage metrics at all?
@ethansbbn good thoughts! Others have same the same thing. We're seeing good engagement with the banners and it gives us an opportunity to add more visual interest to the site, but we're still evaluating if we should keep it.
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@ethansbbn@rrhoover Maybe have a preference you can toggle in your account settings?
@rrhoover You should turn those banners into popups 😂 Then you'd see engagement skyrocket!
jkjk I agree with @ethansbbn, perhaps you could create a smaller version of the banner that sits at the top of the sidebar and automatically scrolls every couple of seconds.
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@rrhoover@ethansbbn - Banners could come in between the feed like sponsored items. Just a thought!
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@muloka@ethansbbn@rrhoover And if you are adding preferences, allow someone to default their page Category (ie. "Tech"), if they wish!!! It's still my first click each visit.
Congrats on the re-launch! Glad to see the vertical feed is back.
I'd love to hear more about the thought process behind the personalised feed. Couple of questions for the team:
1. Early on you frequently referred to PH as a daily "leaderboard" of the best new products. I've always felt that presenting it as "these are the best products of today" was one of the key elements that set PH apart from all the other places we can discover products. – Personalising the feed removes that feeling though. The idea of a leaderboard is that everyone sees the same thing. Now that common experience will go away. Was this a concern when redesigning the homepage?
To use the water cooler metaphor, it seems like with the new design PH might become like the water cooler (the place to discuss something), while before PH was the subject discussed at the water cooler. ("Hey did you see the top product yesterday?", etc)
2. You've chosen to personalise the feed on a somewhat implicit interest graph. Your algorithm tries to figure out what I'd like to see. Contrast this to the idea of sub-reddits where the user explicitly defines her/his interests. Did you consider the latter approach? You do have multiple verticals (Tech / Games / etc) I can filter on, but these are different since they aren't interests (e.g. users aren't interested in "podcasts" or "books", these are simply media).
3. Have you split-tested engagement between the regular feed versus personalised feed? I'd love to hear the results if you're willing to share. Also curious to hear what type of engagement you're measuring (i.e. how do you define success?)
Hey, @marckohlbrugge! Fantastic questions.
1. You're right -- part of what makes Product Hunt special (and also platforms like the Billboard 100 or NYT's front page) is this "town hall" effect where everyone can refer and talk about the same thing. In this new feed, your friends' actions influence what you see but it's still largely driven by the overall community. We believe the best discovery experience is a combination of personalization and a global "leaderboard" so that PH continues to feel like a global watercooler with even greater relevancy.
2. Absolutely. Categories are types of media and not representative of actual interests. Soon we'll introduce hundreds (soon thousands) of Topics for that very use case. P.S. this is the first time I've shared this publicly.
3. We ran a beta test for about a month to get feedback but we haven't done any a/b testing yet. From a metrics perspective, our primary goal with this change is to increase post discoveries (the number of products, games, books, and podcasts people view) as a proxy for engagement and relevancy. If the new homepage works, we should expect people to explore more and return to the site more often.
@rrhoover Thanks for your response! Looking forward seeing the Topics in action. I think that will be a very powerful* way to personalise the feed. I can imagine an on-boarding flow where new users can specify their interests (with personalised recommendations based on their social graph) and immediately see a list of highly relevant products. Cool stuff!
( * we're beta-testing something similar at BetaList right now where users can follow 'markets' and receive a personalised newsletter with just the startups they are interested in )
@rrhoover Absolutely. Right now the daily newsletter with 5 'random' startups is only interesting if you're a die-hard early adopter. However, imagine getting a weekly summary of just the new "Product Discovery" startups. Or as an investor being able to get notified of only fundraising startups in Europe in the education, health and/or payment markets. I expect this will open up our site to a much larger audience and I can imagine the same would be true for PH (to an even larger extend considering the product-focus has a wider appeal).
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This new design is the 🔑 ! Love it!
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BUG
Whenever I click on the notifications. It doesn't always disappear if I click again the notification icon or elsewhere on the page. Even when I click on other products such as this one it continues to remains visible. The only way for it to go away is for me to refresh the page or click on one of the items within the notification window.
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Tested in Chrome 48 on Windows 7 Enterprise
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Cannot reproduce in Chrome 48 on OSX El Capitan.
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@muloka Can reproduce in Chrome 48 on Windows 10 Home.
@muloka I have experienced this in Chrome 48 on OSX El Capitan.
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I still don't get why you seemingly hijack the middle-click on a product link to open the slide over-view, instead of following the ubiquitous standard of letting a user open the link in a new tab. CMD + left-click still works to open a link in a new tab, that's why I assume the click-action-hijacking.
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@boettges The posts actually aren't links at all, just <div>s. It looks like the CTRL+click functionality is re-implemented in React. Would be much better if <a> tags were used and then left-click could be hijacked to trigger the overlay view while leaving CTRL-click, right-click, middle-click and general accessibility intact.
I'm really excited to see the 3.0 update; it's a new chapter in the PH timeline. Though I'll admit I had a little trouble with it at first, I was actually quite intrigued by the horizontal scroll, though I can certainly understand why moving back to the vertical view was the optimal approach. Product Hunt seems to grow and evolve at such an elevated pace, it's sometimes hard to keep up with it. But I think congratulations are in order for the team, as they've continued to build a great product and service, and have only expanded on the things I love (chats in particular). It's gonna be a good year for PH I think :D
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BUG
When viewing the list of Submitted entries from someone's profile page, when you click on a product they submitted the navigation buttons in the top right corner do not work.
Tested in Chrome 48 on Windows 7 Enterprise, cannot reproduce in Chrome 48 on El Capitan
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When I click it displays this error in the console:
Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'componentWillUnmount' of null
Much better, thanks. I found myself visiting the site less and less because the horizontal scroll was really irking me and it was sluggish to use on both computers and tablets. Vertical might be boring, but we seem to process information better this way and device inputs are optimized for it. It's good to see that you guys are able to kill your darlings and pivot quickly.
I'm also looking forward to seeing how the new personalized feed will address some of the criticism regarding which products make it to the front page.
@rrhoover Do you have any lessons to share about your process of opening up the previous design to feedback on InVision? From my perspective, it seemed like everyone was nitpicking about details without questioning whether it was the right way to go at all or not. People will usually work with whatever you place in front of them, instead of taking a step back and looking at the big picture. Reminds me of Henry Ford and the faster horse. I'd love to hear your perspective on it.
@parasight thanks! In hindsight, the horizontal feed wasn't scaleable and too far of a departure from the vertical feed that everyone's used to (every major social platform uses it).
Re: the feedback, we've always taken people's suggestions with an understanding of their context. Community feedback is super important but building for the majority opinion (especially when everyone doesn't have access to the data and our longterm plans) won't result in a great product, most of the time.
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