We have been listening to your feedback and today we have released the first part of a major update to the Asset Store, which has the purpose of improving your discovery and browsing experience on the store.
The improvements that we have completed so far include:
Search and Filtering
Faster search results - we have introduced instant search/filtering
Search suggestions - help you search for the right keyword
Recent search - you can now see you 7 most recent searches
More filters and filters available on the homepage and category pages - e.g. you can now find free assets with one click or search for specific publishers
Typo tolerance, plurals recognition and synonyms
Algorithm improvements for more relevant search results
Responsiveness
Improved experience on different screen sizes - especially mobile
Filters available on all screen sizes - previously they were hidden on mobile and in the Unity editor
New Homepage and Category pages
More curated content on the homepage
We have removed the giant banner on the homepage to show you more content above the fold
Other minor changes
My Asset Page - Improved search, minor UI changes
Navigation - cleaner navigation e.g. with easier access to popular categories/services
Limited site width for a better overview
What’s next?
We will continue to work on improving the Asset Store, as we plan to retire the old store in the coming months once we have solved all major pain points on the current site.
Here are some of the things that we are working on and are planning to release in the coming months:
Product detail pages - including an improved gallery view to make it easier for you to browse through images
List view on listing pages - to enable you to see more assets at a time
Quick look - better way to preview assets from search results pages
Publisher page
My Assets Page - e.g. improvements to manage large amount of assets
Search - we’ll continue to work on improving the search algorithm
Have Feedback?
We would love to hear your feedback on the new and existing features.
You can add your feedback in this thread or use the feedback button on the site, which lets you select specific areas on a page that you want to give feedback on.
For those of you who are avid old store users, please do try out the changes we have made and give us feedback on what you are missing. We are listening and will address the main use cases in our updates over the coming months.
Trying to find the old Asset Store?
The old Asset Store is still available and you can find the link in the footer at the bottom of each page.
We are looking forward to hear your feedback!
Thanks,
The Asset Store Product Team
Update
We have just released the below update to the My Assets page. We will still work on a bigger overhaul of this page, but the update should solve some of the main problems that have been reported.
The update includes:
If you have more than 100 assets, you can now load up to 500 more assets and the page does not freeze while you load more assets
My purchased and my local downloads is merged to one tab and and the “update all” button is available right upfront
Sorting/filtering is now being displayed on all screen sizes
All in all I am happy with the way you are going with the store and especially happy about your list of coming features.
Great job, you are going in the right direction now I believe! Especially the speed of searching is much better now.
I only have two small things to add that for now bothered me while using it for 5 minutes (still testing, will update in the next few days if I find more):
On mobile the categories filter should be either collapsed by default or it should save the state over sessions (using a cookie maybe). On desktop you have the space to have it always shown, but on mobile it is just cluttering the available space and makes it a chore to get to the more important filters. I think most people know what kind of stuff they are looking for and will use some filters like release date and sort by rating or popularity together with a search term, not a categorie. And the ones that are not sure what they are looking for yet will probably start using the recommendations or featured lists on the start page anyway.
On quick preview and the asset page you should show the date of the last release/update of an asset. This is always the first thing I want to know when looking for assets other than art to see if the asset is still receiving updates and the author is still active for support.
The horizontal scrolling navigation on the main page needs to be fixed so the arrows don’t disappear when you reach either end of the list. It should be turned into a circular carousel that resets to either end, rather than the user having to choose to go back and forth. The way it is now artificially favors the assets at the ends of the list, simply because the user will absolutely accidentally click them once the arrows disappear.
I want to say something positive. I know you guys have put in lots of hard work, but its so so hard. The “My Asset” page is still the worst. I need to keep clicking “show more” to see my assets. You are punishing people who buy more assets (your best customers). So much wasted space here. It needs an overhaul, not minor changes. Please.
I’m not 100% sure if it is connected to the layout changes, but I can’t play back asset store videos in the editor anymore, it gives me this error message:
@roykoma Displaying the release date is something we have heard from quite a few users and will most likely be added, when we release the update to quick look and product pages.
@tcmeric Agree that this page is not good enough and we are working on improving it.
@PWPeter We know that this is annoying. It is not related to the recent update though, but to the in-editor browser. For now, you have to open the page in a browser to view videos. There is a new “View in Browser” link in the header, which at least makes it easier for you to open the page in a browser.
Well to be fair, you can (so far at least) still go to the old asset store, they just moved the link from being obvious at the top of the page all the way down to the very bottom where very few will see it.
Ill try to be positive here and say that They seem to be listening atleast better than last time… And are atleast acknowledging some but not all the issues…
Hi, we totally agree with you. As mentioned with the original post we’ll be tackling my assets in subsequent updates over the next couple of months. Key updates mentioned below, but then we also have capacity to work on other feedback.
Product detail pages - including an improved gallery view to make it easier for you to browse through images
List view on listing pages - to enable you to see more assets at a time
Quick look - better way to preview assets from search results pages
Publisher page
My Assets Page - e.g. improvements to manage large amount of assets
Search - we’ll continue to work on improving the search algorithm
Im on the asset store usually several times a day on lunch/coffee breaks. Browsing on my phone, please give mobile zooming some thought as the new store is not usable for me. (the old store can)
It’s better. For those of us who use Unity professionally and 99% of the time just want to get at the information we want and know what we want, the old asset store is still better by far.
My assets, I check that regularly. Still in this version it’s unusable inside Unity due to poor performance. Release notes was generally the first thing I looked at, does it have something worth using. So now release notes expands forcing me to scroll down like up to a couple of pages to close it.
The whole taking up real estate for partial data is I think a loser overall. Or at least stop trying to do that for as much information as you are. I’d rather see more results in a search with a good/quick way to drill down, then see a bunch of information that I either don’t need, or will have to drill down into anyways because the partial data is not enough.
It feels like your designers really have no clue how a lot of us use the asset store and are just guessing. Like you fixed a lot of the obvious to everyone issues, but missed so many little things that I have to think just talking to professional Unity developers would have surfaced.
If anything there has been a huge overabundance of that very feedback. It’s just a matter of believing it and getting it implemented. IMO they’ve moved in the right direction and listened to a lot of the feedback to catch the low hanging fruit so maybe down the line they’ll get more below the surface and address the QoL and usability issues. They still have to redesign the product and publisher pages first, so it’s probably still going to be a while.
Being able to sort downloads by update status, not just “publish date”. At least previously, the two didn’t seem to match 1:1. Currently, the NEW new “my assets” page spins forever if I try to see “my downloads”. When I gave up on it, it took less time to close the asset store window, re-open it and switch to the old store, then go to the downloads page.
I’m not looking forward to dealing with that for another year of “Long Term Support”
That’s the thing… Recently Unity has adopted the bad habit of forcing half-baked features onto their users. Put the “new” store into alpha (it does NOT have all the features WE need) and keep the old one until the “new” store is ready to get out of BETA.
There is too much which doesn’t work the the “new” shop… Imagine we publish a game with half the features missing and the other half not completely working as expected and telling our player base: “Wait for it… we’ll fix it in the oncoming month…” (followed by a whispered “eventually”).
As stated in the original post, we will work on further improvements in the coming months including Product Details Page, Publisher Page, My Assets Page, and other improvements based on your feedback.
It would be great if some of you would join our Usability Tests that we will run while we work on the above.
