Closed Bug 892067 Opened 11 years ago Closed 11 years ago

Order of categories in dropdown is not optimal

Categories

(Marketplace Graveyard :: Consumer Pages, defect, P3)

Product:
Marketplace Graveyard
Component:
Consumer Pages
Platform:
x86
Gonk (Firefox OS)
Type:
defect

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
VERIFIED FIXED
Milestone:
2013-10-14

People

(Reporter: mhanratty, Assigned: cvan)

Details

Attachments

(2 files)

Category dropdown
27.69 KB, image/png
Details
2013-10-09-13-08-53.png
27.43 KB, image/png
Details
Attached image Category dropdown — 
For United States region I current see this order for categories in the dropdown. Games is very far down the list as is social. Should we come up with a list where the most popular categories are on top?

Current order (Region: United States)

Entertainment
Reference
Sports
Shopping
Utilities
Photo & Video
Lifestyle
Health & Fitness
Education
Books
Travel
Social
Productivity
News & Weather
Music 
Games
Business
Maps & Navigation
Currently for Firefox OS - popularity of categories is this order (Utilities are #1 for Android though by far)

Games/Juegos
Utilities/Utilidades
Social/Redes sociales
Productivity
Entertainment
Music
Maps & Navigation
Business
Photo & Video
News & Weather
Books
Education
Reference
Lifestyle
Travel
Sports
Health & Fitness
Shopping

I suggest we put in this order of popularity (though this may change since some of these categories have little content).  Does this make sense?
Our category database has weights, which we could sort by.

One idea: Run a nightly cron to calculate number of installed apps per category, and update the weights so the category with the highest number of installed apps is at the top.
Keywords: uiwanted
Let's compare the list of highest number of installed apps vs. the popularity list and see if there is significant overlap. Would it be possible to get a list of most popular search terms to also add to the mix?
I love GA. Top searches.

Search Term	Total Unique Searches
whatsapp	721
facebook	335
youtube	292
google	271
line	235
skype	176
gmail	169
maps	134
cut the rope	123
firefox	121
loqui	113
dropbox	112
angry birds	101
whats	100
twitter	97
what	96
instagram	94
whats app	91
map	89
mail	86
calculator	84
gps	84
file	82
weather	81
viber	79
chat	77
importer	77
games	72
explorer	70
game	70
angry	67
here	67
notes	66
chrome	63
spotify	63
tuenti	63
messenger	61
browser	57
music	57
pdf	57
evernote	56
calc	55
cut	53
radio	52
note	51
qr	48
email	46
office	45
qq	43
terminal	43
	15669
So what should the list look like?
Lonnen suggests [1] that we randomize the order of the categories and collect stats until clear usage statistics appear. If no clear statistics appear, it means that users prefer the randomized order.

[1] His exact words were "Multi-armed bandit. Build it, ship it."[2]
[2] He read that on Hacker News
Whiteboard: [genetic algorithms wanted]
Note: Basta said these things at me, then wrote them down citing me as the source.
django-waffle has samples too :)
Did some analysis by Android and FxOS in terms of order listed, and then category rank by each OS in terms of page views.  I think this data is essentially like a random list test as we have no particular reason to the order, and user popularity looks unrelated (at my first glance).  Data is here (over a period of time I won't specify, but a good sample size):

Order	Category   	Rank	Android FxOS	FxOS PageVIews	
1	Entertainment	4	2525	3	1279
2	Reference	11	790	14	242
3	Sports	        15	588	11	276
4	Shopping	17	396	16	212
5	Utilities	1	8168	2	1618
6	Photo & Video	3	3671	7	641
7	Lifestyle	13	660	12	244
8	Health & Fit	18	376	15	213
9	Education	14	633	16	178
10	Books	        9	824	13	247
11	Travel	        16	449	17	172
12	Social	        7	1466	4	1166
13  	Productivity	5	2225	6	727
14	News & Weather	12	737	10	429
15	Music	        6	1569	5	770
16	Games	        2	3802	1	4534
17	Business	10	798	9	480
18	Maps & Navig	8	1078	8	568

My conclusion is that category popularity is unrelated to order of the category, and there is a relative consistency between Android users and FxOS users in terms of categories of interest though the demographics are largely different. The major differences are that Android users are clearly looking for Utilities (and in particular flash) and FxOS users for Games.  There are some variations across languages and countries (with more interest in social networks in Spanish, for instance)

Though popularity of a category is relatively unrelated to its order position, I would show more popular categories first.  And in particular Games and Utilities, just to make them easier to find before scrolling. 

I did not show Operator Shelf in this, which is first on the menu on FxOS in some regions.  I will not comment on popularity.
My vote (for simplicity's sake) is to list in alphabetical order with "Games" on top. Users won't have to hunt for a category--if they know the category they can find it in the alphabetical order. This is what Google Play & iOS do. 


PROPOSAL 1: Alpha
Games
Books
Business
Education
Entertainment
Health & Fitness
Lifestyle
Maps & Navigation
Music
News & Weather
Photo & Video
Productivity
Reference
Security
Shopping
Sports
Travel
Utilities
David do you approve of changing the order of the categories (to alphabetically with Games on top) so we can close this bug?
Flags: needinfo?(dbialer)
Yes.  Absolutely.
Flags: needinfo?(dbialer)
The question now is how to implement this. We could noodle around with category weights in the admin interface, but that mucks up operator shelves.

Perhaps this should be blocked on the new curation tool launching (tomorrow?!) so we can get those out of there and not have to worry about where the operator shelves show up in the list?
Assignee: nobody → cvan
Target Milestone: --- → 2013-09-24
(In reply to Maureen Hanratty from comment #11)
> Security

Is that a category?
Ran on -dev: https://marketplace-dev.allizom.org/

$ manage.py shell_plus

weights = {
    'games': 180, 
    'books': 170,
    'business': 160,
    'education': 150,
    'entertainment': 140,
    'health-fitness': 130, 
    'lifestyle': 120, 
    'maps-navigation': 110, 
    'music': 100, 
    'news-weather': 90,
    'photo-video': 80,
    'productivity': 70,
    'reference': 60,
    'shopping': 50,
    'social': 40,
    'sports': 30,
    'travel': 20, 
    'utilities': 10
}

for cat in Category.objects.filter(type=11):
    if cat.slug in weights:
        cat.update(weight=weights[cat.slug])
Please note that on desktop the list of categories reads from left-to-right not up-to-down:
http://f.cl.ly/items/291X3n3D2D3u032v2W0d/Screen%20Shot%202013-10-08%20at%201.46.34%20PM.png

We ought to fix that, but rumour has it the category drop-down menu is in flux? But that's a separate issue altogether FYI.
Ran on stage and prod too. Thanks, everyone!
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 11 years ago
Resolution: --- → FIXED
Target Milestone: 2013-09-24 → 2013-10-14
Keywords: uiwanted
Whiteboard: [genetic algorithms wanted]
verified fixed. See attached post-fix screenshot.
Status: RESOLVED → VERIFIED
Yeah!!!
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