When we rolled out the Top Scores pages as part of the social features in Noteflight 1.3 a few weeks ago, we did something that had some unintended consequences. We used the date that a score was last changed in order to decide whether a score was fresh enough to show in the “New This Week” list. The unintended result of this decision was that scores which continue to be actively changed by their authors remained in the “New…” listing long after they weren’t really new any more. This kind of defeated the point of “New This Week”, which was to provide constant novelty and provide ready access to scores that are receiving new attention.

Also, our intention was to highlight multiple pages of favorites, both recent ones, and long-term ones. However, the navigation between these pages was obscure and lots of people missed the small drop-down list that provided the choice.

As a result, we’ve made a change. We have introduced two new tabs under “Browse”: recent favorites, and all-time favorites. The recent favorites listing will be more aggressive in focusing on scores that have indeed been favorited recently, and the score’s presence in the list will depend on the timing of other users choosing it as a favorite, not on whether the score itself changes or not. We’ll probably continue to tweak our approach moving forward!

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