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Homepage overhaul

Issues

The first impression matters, alas Funkwhale's homepage has many flaws

  1. The whole stuff feels oldish
  • landing page is austere, verbose, and with its many input fields looks a bit like a survey form
  • footer makes funkwhale look like a set of embedded web page, rather than a cohesive app
  • actual content feels constrained between the "about" section and footer
  1. Poor content quality
  • there may be many missing album art and metadata
  • there is no guarantee regarding the audio encoding
  • shown categories of items are a bit vague: "recently added" and "new channels"
  • lack of meaningful ways to discover content that people may like
  1. Landing page is redundant with other important pages
  • "Explore/browse" and "Library/browse" pages reuse the same categories
  • the actual content on the landing page is almost identical to what we find in "Explore/Browse"
  • Explore/browse page may show big gray areas to newcomers, in empty sections like "Recently listened" and "recently favorited"
  • funkwhale logo leads to a different page whether people are using their account or not
  • Explore and Library menus look the same, with many items
  • quick access to albums⋅artists⋅playlists is fine for library, but goes against the idea of exploration
  • on the contrary, not sure exploration of your own library through "library/browse" is required, as quick access are available
  1. Visuals

What could we do?

Below some ideas to make the page more engaging

  1. Reorganize the landing page
  • Move verbose stuff and input fields to proper sections and at better timings
  • find a better place for footer's content, in particular settings⋅help⋅about
  • drop footer
  1. Require a minimal quality for content on first page
  • allow for some kind of curation, (see this request for an approval flow[1])
  • show only content with album arts / pictures and filled in metadata on first page
  • show only content with audio bitrate higher than mp3@128kbps
  1. Make homepage more distinct of other top-level pages
  • keep a single homepage for both people with an account and non-connected visitors
  • refine the homepage to present identified people with items relevant to them
  • use the homepage as a starting point for exploration, ie, drop the whole "Explore" submenu
  1. Improve visuals and layout
  • fix existing cards
  • design & implements new cards for new features, like curated content, moods, etc
  • fix layout so it make better use of screen width and looks