A peek into Marketplace's new app listing page

skanodia · May 24, 2021, 5:30pm

I’m excited to share with you a preview of the new app listing page for Atlassian Marketplace. We’ve been working on this for some time now and expect to begin rolling this out to our users in June 2021.

With this, we unify the look and feel for app listing pages for in-product marketplaces in Jira, Confluence, and that on marketplace.atlassian.com.

Note : These screenshots represent an early implementation, and we expect to make minor tweaks to the design before the general release.

How does this affect existing app listings?

Partners do not need to make any changes to their existing listing. We expect all content to be preserved, just presented in a manner closer to the in-product Marketplace’s app listing page.

nick · May 24, 2021, 10:56pm

Thanks for sharing @skanodia.

Quick questions;

how does this perform for conversion vs the current design?
how are you testing the new vs current design? A/B test with SEM to see consistent bounce rate, conversion, etc?

Thanks,
Nick

dmitry.astapkovich · May 25, 2021, 3:52am

IMO, it’s just more scrolling and “new/modern/fresh look”. I honestly hate it because with the old view I can quickly understand what app is about in a single screen. Now I will just scroll down, skipping most of the content.

I had a discussion about that with Atlassian representative on Summit years ago, my reasons to keep it as is were accepted. But still here’s “the new listing view”.

As for conversion rate, Atlassian should at least fix flag to open links from description in the new tab, make description editing easier or think about ways for vendors to have demo instances with automatic login to showcase apps with no hassle. That would actually work, but it will a bit more complex than creating another layout for a page.

Another thing that would be great, is option to share app description. At least for Server and Data Center, ideally - all apps if all versions have feature parity.

julie.dantin · May 25, 2021, 7:34am

Hello @skanodia,
Thanks for sharing these changes ahead of time. I share the same questions as @nick above.
I see the point of willing to bring the same experience in product and on the marketplace to clients, but I’d like to be reassured it’s going to be on par or increase performance (conversion) of our listings.

An other point I’d like to raise is that the version (Cloud / Server / Data Center) menu feels less visible. Some vendors, like us, offer different features on different platform, and while we strive for bringing clients the same benefits, it can be confusing and frustrating for them if they don’t clearly see that they’re browsing the app on one platform, and that others don’t have the same functionality.

skanodia · May 25, 2021, 9:31am

Hello @nick. As I mentioned in the post, this is an early preview for the members of the developer community, and we haven’t started rolling this out to our users yet.

Also —

We’ve consciously avoided making large changes in the user experience which users might affect user behaviour one way or the other with this new look. The overview page too — which is a noticeable change from before — uses a design that might be familiar to cloud users.
That said, we’d be closely tracking both business and engineering metrics for this rollout which would happen in a phased manner, to ensure there isn’t a significant delta between the two.

skanodia · May 25, 2021, 9:34am

Hi @julie.dantin, yes we would be tracking conversion (among other) metrics as we roll out.

As for the point on the the visibility of hosting selector menu in the new look — we already have this on our list and expect to see a small change here before release

remie · May 25, 2021, 9:46am

@skanodia you’re not answering the two very specific questions @nick asked:

how does this perform for conversion vs the current design?
how are you testing the new vs current design? A/B test with SEM to see consistent bounce rate, conversion, etc?

Can you please elaborate on this in a open company, no bullshit manner? That also includes just saying that there is no plan to track conversation rates or implement A/B testing.

Grzegorz.Tanczyk · May 25, 2021, 11:03am

I’m sorry to burst this bubble about A/B tests, but they might be pointless here, because most of the content on MPAC is not optimised for this new layout, so you will rather get worse results.

I welcome this change, because finally we can optimise for single version of layout - the same as in-product marketplace.

remie · May 25, 2021, 11:11am

I don’t care about the A/B testing. That was @nick question. I only care about actually getting answers to questions.

WojciechSeliga · May 26, 2021, 3:04pm

Couple of IMHO important things:

We have had many years to optimise the content for the fixed layout of the listing enforced by Marketplace. It’s better/safer to assume that if the content stays intact and the layout changes, the conversion will deteriorate (as @Grzegorz.Tanczyk pointed out).
And the contrary: if the new layout has better potential and vendors adjust the content to leverage it, then the conversion should improve
Optimising the content for the new layout may take us some time (e.g. which highlight to put to the top, it was less important when there were listed in 3 columns - read by vast majority of visitors. Now scrolling is needed to read more).

Such change, which looks like a very subtle one may have serious consequences on conversion and thus the business of the vendors (and Atlassian share). Fraction of per cents could mean millions of dollars difference.

That means that such change should be tested well. Ideally allowing vendors to modify the content too to leverage it.

I suggest rolling it out in opt-in manner per app and let each vendor decide for which app to turn it on (by default turn it off). Some vendors will jump immediately into it, some others (like us) will be more careful and opt-in gradually app by app, reviewing and potentially adjusting the content and carefully monitoring the conversion.

The alternative would be to roll it out (without touching the content) to a canary set of apps for which vendors agree to accept the risk and monitor the conversion centrally by Atlassian - comparing user behaviour and the conversion (“Try it free” is probably the main goal). After a while (like a few weeks), publish the results and if the conversion is not worse, then I think all vendors will not mind this change even without giving them time to adjust the content.

I would like to also understand what the goals for this change are and how exactly they are going to be measured. Is it increasing the conversion? What it means in practice? Clicking on “Try for free” button? What with Clicking on Pricing? Clicking on other recommended apps? Clicking on pictures, videos?
Such change requires setting the goals and metrics clearly upfront, measuring the real behaviour (ideally on a subset of the apps) and telling us how these metrics are impacted and if the goals have been reached. Otherwise we will be just talking about personal opinions and the sense of the taste. Indeed the new layout look nicer (to me). But will it perform better?

Cheers,
Wojtek

PS. I am aware that similar layout has been already rolled out in UPM. It took me by surprise (perhaps I missed similar announcement, if yes, please share the link!). Still I think (assume - no hard data) that more customers browse Marketplace to explore new apps and UPM listings are more often used to install the already known app or browse a short-list of the apps. That’s why this change here probably will have a bigger impact.

AnkitJain · May 27, 2021, 4:38am

Hi everyone,
The team is working on putting together a FAQ that addresses the concerns raised on this thread. It should help allay concerns regarding potential change management & impact assessment. We will share that to solicit more feedback before we make any release.

A short summary in the meanwhile:

Primary motivation for the change is to provide more resiliency to all Marketplace properties in the event of an unforeseen outage. Secondary motivation is to have both tech stack & experience parity between Emcee (in-product Marketplace) & external website. We are not intending to make any major design revamp of the page.
It is in all our interest to be watchful of the impact on conversion & have guard rail mechanisms

Our teams will be taking due precaution that the changes are net-beneficial to us in Customer experience and conversion.

Thanks,
Ankit Jain

Stavros99 · May 27, 2021, 2:43pm

@AnkitJain you need to fix some of the issues on the in-app marketplace pages before make it the public default (more or less what doing).

I have worked with different vendors as a consultant and my own pages, I’m happy to have a Zoom call you share. I’m a writer and the lack of detail to paragraphing and other formatting is odd. Feels like the engineering running the text formatting, it’s good enough but is poor for the end user experience.

When this goes to public pages the problems now amplify. I do appreciate the that current public marketplace needs an update, it’s is shockingly in 2021 not able to work even decently on mobile.

AnkitJain · May 27, 2021, 5:05pm

Thanks @Stavros99 - would love to connect with you!

nick · May 28, 2021, 12:01am

Hi @skanodia,

Will the Reviews tab get a makeover too? Possible to provide a link to auto-open the review dialog instead of relying on the customer finding the ‘Write a review’ link, or not seeing it at all if they are not logged in?

Thanks,
Nick Muldoon, Easy Agile

skanodia · May 28, 2021, 4:07am

We aren’t going to be making changes to tabs other than overview at this time, including the review tab.

Possible to provide a link to auto-open the review dialog instead of relying on the customer finding the ‘Write a review’ link, or not seeing it at all if they are not logged in?

This is something can consider adding — may not make the release cut, but I’ve created a ticket to track this.

Thanks @nick.

nick · June 1, 2021, 3:18am

Thank you.

Is there an AMKT we can track for this?

MaciekSaganowski · June 1, 2021, 8:15am

Hey mate,
Good stuff. Question, what about support for animated GIFS, it’s a biggie. Start stop gif based on the browser viewport, something like that.
cheers
Maciek

skanodia · June 2, 2021, 6:42am

Not one on the public jira tracker, but I’ll keep you posted on this thread when we do.

nick · June 3, 2021, 6:35am

Would it please be possible to use Jira for this stuff, that’s what it’s intended to be used for. And Community is for discussions. Please.

skanodia · June 3, 2021, 4:35pm

Hi everyone. Hopefully, this FAQ provides more thorough answers to questions & concerns that we’ve been hearing about the change —

Why are changes being done to the App Listing pages on marketplace.atlassian.com?

We’re updating the app listing pages on the Marketplace website to improve reliability and also to unify the Marketplace website (MPAC) and in-product app discovery (Emcee) experiences. Marketplace had major incidents in 2020 which led to extended downtime. During these downtime periods, users weren’t able to view the app listing page and buy apps.

Our long term approach to improving reliability has been to re-architect Marketplace and progressively move functionality to a newer, more maintainable tech stack. We’ve already moved the following pages to the new stack - Home, Search, Category and Vendor Details pages. As a result, these pages were largely available to our users even during a major incident in August 2020.

Now, we aim to move the App Listing pages on MPAC to this new stack as well.

What changes are planned for the App Listing pages on MPAC?

Along with this migration to the new resilient stack, we also want to move to a common code for both Emcee and MPAC, which makes it easier to maintain both properties & improves our development velocity.

This common code gives us the opportunity to make the MPAC pages have design parity with the existing Emcee pages. The Emcee pages already comply with the latest Atlassian Design Guidelines and share the same design language as in use by parent products.

Apart from a general refresh to use Atlaskit and the latest design guidelines, the only minor change on the MPAC page is in the Overview tab layout. All other tabs will continue to closely resemble the ones we see today.

(Click for a larger view)

As a Marketplace Partner, do you need to make any changes to your listing?

As such, there are no changes required to be done by the Partners for this new design. The new page incorporates all the content and merchandising assets uploaded at the time of publishing your apps.

The Overview tab layout, which has been live in Emcee of Jira and Confluence for a long time now, uses larger highlight images and bold text to provide a more immersive experience to our users. These larger images are powered by the “cropped screenshots” for highlights uploaded by Partners at the time of publishing the app version.

The unification of the MPAC & Emcee experience gives an additional advantage to the Partners - from here on you’ll only have to consider one single layout for App Listing pages, across both Emcee and MPAC, to optimise your content.

There is no change in URLs, pages or content that is indexed for SEO.

What is our rollout plan?

We plan to do a gradual rollout of this page to our users starting mid-June 2021. During this gradual rollout, we will closely monitor page speed and availability, among other health metrics. Below is our tentative rollout plan:

Date	Rollout %
14th June 2021	5%
16th June 2021	10%
6th July 2021	50%
13th July 2021	100%

We will also monitor “App Listing page conversion” as a guard rail metric to ensure there is no negative business impact, as our shared goal with the Partners is to make it easier for customers to install apps.

Will an A/B test be done to determine the new design effectiveness?

The primary motivation of this change is to move to a much more resilient newer tech stack. As such, this change is not an “A/B test” candidate but a “gradual rollout with monitoring” candidate (as mentioned above). We have aimed to keep the design changes to be at a bare minimum & have aligned with the already existing Emcee experience.

However, as mentioned above, we will be rolling out gradually and carefully monitoring any impact on conversion. This is our standard approach for any significant user-facing change.

Can you preview your listings in this new layout before they go live?

The Overview tab layout has already been in use Emcee in Jira and Confluence. That means you can preview the appearance of the upcoming new layout on MPAC by checking your listings in the Emcee. We have future plans to introduce a Preview functionality for ease of making of App Listing changes, but not immediately as a result of the current set of changes.

Are further changes planned for user-facing pages?

At the moment, there are no plans for major changes or redesign of the App Listing page or other user-facing changes. However, we are going to specifically focus on improving the performance of the App Listing page and the movement to the new stack will help us significantly in this endeavour.

Thanks for your patience.