Hi everyone,
Following the major updates that we rolled out to search over the past month, we just released another big update to Fab that includes further search improvements, a UX overhaul, and wishlists!
Search
Unreal Engine Marketplace and Sketchfab historical data
Historical data from both marketplaces has now been integrated with Fab and is part of determining the quality ranking within search results.
The next step for the team over the coming few weeks will be to further integrate current Fab data (downloads, sales, etc.) into the search algorithm so that we will eventually have a good balance between the weight of any historical data that a product might have relative to its current data. We are aiming to keep things balanced so that new publishers have as great a chance of discovery on Fab as legacy marketplace sellers.
As before, we are continuing to tweak the weighting of data to fine tune things, which will affect the order of search results from time to time.
UX
Left Nav Tree
Fab now features a lefthand navigation that contains the various product categories.
While searching, this navigation tree will give you a quick overview of how many products there are per category, and it allows you to easily narrow down your search to one specific category.
Filter Bar
We moved the filter bar to a horizontal position and gave it various updates as previewed in the previous Dev update post.
As part of this update, the filter bar now also sticks to the top of the screen as you scroll through search results.
Filter by Tag
It’s also possible to filter by any tag. Just start typing and tags will appear in a dropdown.
Filter by Publisher
We’ve introduced a publisher filter, so you can easily narrow a search down to your favorite publisher(s).
Filter by Style v1
You can now filter by rendering style or period/theme.
This filter utilizes tags from listing pages and its utility is thus dependent on products making use of these tags for this feature to work well. We expect this style filter to improve over time as more and more products use these tags.
If you are a content publisher, please take a moment to review and update the style and technical tags on your product listings. The full list of tags included in these filters can be found in this post.
We are going to continue improving this going forward. For one we are working on a UX to offer these key tags in the publisher portal to help publishers discover and use the tags better.
Filter by Technical Features v1
You can now filter content based on tags related to technical features. This is the first version of this new filter, and over time we will be adding more options to this.
Like the Style filter, the utility and success of this filter relies on publishers utilizing these tags in their product listings.
Persistent Content Settings
Previously, you could toggle your search filters for AI-generated and Mature content. Now, we’re updating this setting so when you select your preference, your settings will be saved and in effect every time you come to Fab. These settings have also been moved to the Content Settings menu
Search Suggestions
The search suggestion pop-up has been updated.
Miscellaneous recent UX changes & fixes
Improvements
- Max tags per product increase from 15 to 20
- Button added to fullscreen media on a product page
Fixes
- When returning to a search result, the scroll position within the page is correctly maintained
- Drag/Drop supported from within My Library in UE5 Plugin
- Cleaned up formats filter by removing unused formats
Please note: Some of the UX changes listed in this post have not yet been applied to the Fab UE5 & UEFN plugins. Mirroring these updates to those is next up.
Wishlists
Wishlists are now live! We appreciate everyone’s patience as we’ve been working on this initial release. You can start building your wishlist today, and we’ll continue adding more functionality to wishlists going forward (see the bottom of this section for more details on what’s coming).
Here’s what’s live today: you can now add items to your wishlist either with the little icon on a product card:
Or via the product listing page:
You can access your wishlist from the bookmark icon at the top right corner of the page. The wishlist supports a maximum of 150 items.
If the wishlist feature does not appear for you in the UE5 Plugin or UEFN integration it is due to the cache. If you want to force refresh it you could delete the webcache folder within the \Saved folder of your project. Note this will require you to re-login within the plugin.
Here are some of the items on the wishlists roadmap:
- We will be adding a visual alert on the wishlist button to indicate when item(s) in your wishlist are on sale or temporarily /free.
- Email notifications for when wishlisted items go on sale.
- Just as is the case with adding items to your cart, there is a 1-2 second delay between adding an item and it appearing within the wishlist.
Next UX Steps
We are going to continue to focus on improving the UX and usability for a while, specifically:
- We have a long list of miscellaneous UX fixes and quality of life improvements across the website and the UE5 plugin as well as UEFN integration. This includes everything from small fixes such as shortcuts to more substantial issues such as local currencies not displaying correctly.
- Getting the UE5 & UEFN plugins to have UX parity with the website (filter bar, nav tree)
- Page performance on both web and within the UE5 plugin/UEFN integration, as well as 3D viewer performance within both. This one is going to be tricky though, and we need to investigate exactly where we can focus our efforts to make noticeable improvements.
- Generating Comments/Forum threads per product to offer a place to discuss, showcase work, ask questions and provide support for each product.
- We need a universal solution that works across a range of formats for how to handle technical details like polycount. Once we have that, we can use it to extend the filtering features further.
- We want to see if we can improve Fab’s category structure by making it something more flexible and easier to use.
