Hello Creators,
As part of our ongoing efforts to enhance user experience, we’re gearing up to launch larger tiles with 16:9 thumbnails on Home Recommendations across mobile, web, and desktop in early April.
This means bigger and better representation for your experiences! These new tiles with 16:9 thumbnails will replace the current icons within the Recommendations section of Home.
Action needed: Before April, we highly recommend reviewing your asset list to ensure that the first 16:9 thumbnail accurately represents what you wish to showcase to users on Home. This could significantly improve the effectiveness of your Home recommendations.
Why the Change?
As we explained in our discovery vision post, we want Home to be increasingly immersive and provide more visual information for our users to make a decision. Part of this vision involves tailoring the size of the experience tile on Home to cater to varying user needs. For new recommendations requiring more immersive evidence to guide user decisions, a larger grid tile size is essential. But for recommendations aimed at reminding users of familiar experiences, such as the Continue section within Home, we’ve found that using smaller tile sizes works better.
After testing 16:9 thumbnails on Home recommendations, we’ve seen a positive response from our users. Our experiments showed a 7.2% increase in overall unique plays from recommendations on web and desktop. Particularly, experiences with high-quality thumbnails saw even greater improvement during this period. For these reasons, we want to highly encourage you to optimize your thumbnails on Home using the guidelines below.
How you can optimize your 16:9 thumbnails on Home
Post Launch in early April, the first 16:9 image thumbnail in your asset list will be displayed in the recommendations section of Home. Please note that while we continue to experiment with different tile sizes across the home and discovery surfaces, following the launch in early April, your Experience Icons (1:1) will continue to be displayed on the Continue, Sponsored, and Favorite sections of Home, Search, and Discover.
Here’s what you can do to optimize your thumbnails:
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Make sure you have your preferred image thumbnail in the first slot of your asset list. If there’s no image thumbnail available for the experience, we’ll automatically display the Roblox thumbnail. However, relying on the default Roblox thumbnail may lower the overall end-to-end conversion rate of your Home recommendations, as they do not effectively represent your experiences.
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Check out our new thumbnails guide for tips on optimizing your thumbnail for Home. For instance, avoid placing any essential text or elements at the bottom of the thumbnail, as it could potentially be covered by metadata like the player count.
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Continue maintaining your experience icon. Check out our icon guide for tips on optimizing your icon for Home. This will be displayed on the Continue section of Home, Search, and Discover.
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Keep an eye on the home recommendations conversion rate in the acquisition page in Creator Analytics to gauge the impact of thumbnail changes. We’ll highlight thumbnails instead of icons in this chart when we switch over to thumbnails for Recommendations.
What’s next
To recap, we’re switching from icons to thumbnails on Home recommendations in early April, so please optimize your thumbnails as soon as possible.
But that’s not all! We’re also working on more ways to help you optimize your experience tiles on Home.
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Improved Metadata and Insights on the tile: Moving forward, we will continue to test various insights, such as Player Count (CCU), Friend Activity Presence, and Genre, while also introducing new insights on the tiles. These concerted efforts are aimed to make your experiences more compelling to our users on Home.
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Thumbnail Personalization: We are actively exploring a feature that’ll let you show different thumbnails for different Roblox user groups, which could provide additional ways to boost your conversion rate and engagement. Stay tuned for more updates on thumbnail personalization in the coming months.
Please let us know if you have any questions.
Thank you.
This will definitely improve featured experiences!
