Monday, July 23rd 2018

App Store Search Ranking and Information Density

Rory Prior of ThinkMac Software (via Michael Tsai ):

It’s hard to overlook the major changes Apple made to the App Store with iOS 11 – search results are now extremely low density. You can barely see two results on a screen at once on a 4.7″ device, so if you’re say 40 or 60 places down your visibility is near zero.

There's a big trend for lower information density even on big mobile devices. I do think there's an inherent irony to user's buying large phones and content similarly scaling up at a similar or even larger rate.

For a lot of things I think this is fine and generally makes content more accessible and legible. However, in the case of the App Store™ there are certain trade-offs that designers need to consider. One is that top search results likely get more conversions and thus even higher rankings and results just below top likely fall off the curve (and potentially out of profitability).

Updated on Saturday, Feb. 15th 2020