Gilect Play’s homepage remained mostly unchanged for a year and a half. The homepage was suitable when there were only a handful of games and categories. However, the website grew and became the home of nearly 200 games. To accommodate the huge increase in games, we’re excited to reveal Gilect Play’s brand-new design!
Okay, we realize that this looks pretty similar to what we’ve had before. But we promise that the homepage is far better organized now. Plus, it’s even easier to discover new games with our neatly categorized sections.
In this blog post, we’ll detail what changed, what stayed the same, and how this will make finding your favorite games even easier. We’ll also discuss some of our design and UX inspirations and the process behind designing this. Finally, we’ll talk about the future of both Gilect.com and Gilect Play.
What’s New?
First, we’ve eliminated the gradient boxes that filled up the page. Generally, these boxes contained a set of games for a specific category, and two were lined up side-by-side. It was too much visual clutter, and while it did a good job at separating categories, it severely limited discoverability.
Most users didn’t realize they could swipe to see more games, or hover over them to reveal an arrow on either end of the carousel. Not only does each category now take up a full row (we believe all categories deserve their space to shine!), but a small fade at the right side hints that there are more games to scroll through.
All categories are still clearly labeled with our new font, Montserrat Alternates. It takes a fun and playful approach to the standard Montserrat font we use. This makes it great for headings and labels. Game titles below images still use the condensed font Oswald to fit more text on one line.
A think white divide between categories also helps keep them more distinct.
Also, we moved the Newly Added section to the top. This way you can always check back on our front page to see what’s new.
Occasionally, the game rows are broken up by a large section, like the multiplayer banner. This way, scrolling doesn’t get too monotonous!
Unlike before, the amount of game icons per row scales dynamically depending on device size. Larger screens can show up two eight games per row at once.
Design Inspiration
When revamping the homepage, we specifically looked at streaming services such as Disney+ and Paramount+. Almost every streaming service has a large portion at the top dedicated to showing a preview of a featured movie. The rest of the page is split up into rows, each one being a specific category.
A great benefit of this is that the latest movies are featured at the top in a slideshow. Meanwhile, the user can continue scrolling through categories that interest them. This makes it easy for users to find something new to watch every time they re-open the streaming service.
We kept this design philosophy in mind for Gilect Play. Our goal was to make it as easy as possible for users to discover new games to play daily!
Occasionally, streaming services break up the uniformity of a grid of thumbnails. Generally, they add things like a Top 10 List or a carousel of brands. Once again, this was something that we took inspiration from on our homepage:
Another great example of a gaming platform that utilizes rows of games is Roblox. On the “Charts” page, they split up games into groups like “Trending” and “Top Revisited”.
We’re constantly looking to add new categories and game sorts to Gilect Play. Let us know if you want to see anything in specific!
What’s Next for Gilect Play?
Now that the homepage for desktop and tablet is redesigned, we want to shift focus to our mobile UI. Currently, the mobile page is just a huge grid of games. Just like the desktop layout, we plan on adding rows of categories that users can scroll through. Hopefully, this will give a more unified experience across devices.
Recently, we asked some of our users to fill out a feedback form. We heard your feedback! New features are in the works. These include an option to create an account, favorite games, and have tailored recommendations on the homepage (similar to Roblox).
Gilect.com, our free hosting service, will continue to exist. We plan on allowing users to seamlessly embed select games from Gilect Play onto their websites hosted with Gilect.com. This way, anybody can make their own gaming website!
Finally, we will be focusing on continuing to add games. Lots of people requested more games, so stay tuned weekly for new releases and re-releases!