Hi all!
We've made some changes to the Sources section of our desktop site navigation (affectionately referred to as Mega Menu).
Since it's release in 2019, it had become quite expansive with each new book we added and was already unusable on some of our more popular laptop screen sizes. We've even had to avoid adding some of our recent digital releases as there just wasn't any room.
To solve this problem, we've removed our least popular books. However, we've made it easier (and more obvious) to get to our Sources page which will always have every book:
Once you're on the Sources page, you can filter to find exactly what you're looking for:
We know that this change means an extra step to get to some of our content, but we've put this off for far too long. The mobile menu will be getting updated in the new couple of weeks with similar changes as we prefer to keep them in parity.
While this alleviates the immediate problems, we do not consider it a long-term solution. We will continue exploring ways to make navigating our site easier and hope to give y'all the ability to personalize that experience in the future. For now, this change will allow us to make sure we can always keep our latest content where it's easiest to find - so keep an eye out for New! labels which will be presented in yellow text.
That's it for now! Have a wonderful day and may your dice be kind!
An idea maybe as most people would only be running one or two adventures at a time, maybe we could favourite up to three adventures which are displayed and the others can be kept in the adventure page which should free up alot of space.
Am uncertain how to do sourcebooks though as many can be useful depending on what the DM wants to use, though maybe hide the books that aren't owned/unlocked via campaign sharing?
I would like the option to decide what is "featured" for me because there are some books I use more than other and now some of them are hidden unless I go all the way to the sources page, and things like the basic rules should be hidden for people who own the PHB and DMG because why would I want to use the free source that is missing things when I own the full content
Favoriting or frequently used (based on user interaction) books would be very helpful. I frequently pull up specific books for reference, but have a lot of books for compendium use. The books I use for reference change over time and could be automatically updated or just allow me to add and remove from the favorited section.
This is a nice addition, but..
it does not increase user experience and utility as it could have.
At least try to be subtle, having products shoved into your face like this all the time is so off-putting. Products that I have decided not to buy - can that be respected.
Don´t sacrifice costumer experience and support on the altar of poor profit making strategies.
What "less popular" books are now hidden on the Sources page? Here they are:
Volo's Guide to Monsters
The Tortle Package
Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes
Wayfinder's Guide to Eberron
Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica
Acquisitions Incorporated
Mordenkainen's Fiendish Folio Volume 1
Monstrous Compendium Volume One
The Vecna Dossier
Players Handbook (Italian)
Rrakkma
Lost Laboratory of Kwalish
Hunt for the Thessalhydra
Sleeping Dragon's Wake
Divine Contention
D&D vs Rick and Morty
Locathah Rising
Infernal Machine Rebuild
The Radient Citadel (not Journeys)
Spelljammer Academy
Here is my feedback:
The Featured Sourcebooks start with the Core and Expanded rulebooks, and then go in alphabetical order starting with Eberron. I'd suggest moving Ebberon, Wildemount, and Fizban's over to the top of the next column, to keep the alphabetical books together. The "Looking for more..." message could then go at the bottom of both columns.
The Featured Adventures are all in alphabetical order, even though some books are linked (Hoard of the Dragon Queen, Rise of Tiamat; Dragon of Icespire Peak, Storm Lord's Wrath; both Waterdeeps). I'd experiment with grouping those closer together, maybe at the end of the alphabetical list.
I'd be interested to see the popularity of each book, like how often the pages are visited on D&D Beyond, maybe in a Dev Update.
Add me to the list of people who would prefer to either collate my own Featured lists or to have those populated from the books I've bought. For example, if I've bought the core rules I don't need the Basic Rules there. Likewise, I have no interest in Eberron, Critical Role, or the MtG supplements.
Is it at all possible to, like the mobile menu, display already purchased sourcebooks/campaign modules at the top? Or, at least, have sorting options to display only purchased content?
A bit of customization would be helpful; the most recent things I've run are a Ravnica one-shot and The Lost Laboratory of Kwalish, and I couldn't help but notice that the sourcebooks for both now require diving into the less-compact secondary menu. A huge amount of the menu space (more than half of it, now) is taken up by published adventures, but even if a campaign is run entirely off of published content, a DM rarely needs more than one of those open at a time and a player is fine without any of them?
I'll second on this that "favorites" would be a nicer way to clean up things. Keep some favorites plus the 1-2 most recent books if logged in.
It would be nice if we had a Dev Update again that talked about these kind of things!
Thank you for the information! Please count me as another user who would like to pin (choose to see at the top) the sources I use most.
Could we maybe have folders for characters? A way for DMs to sort NPCs for various campaigns and keep them separate from character ideas?
Add my vote for letting us mark certain books as "Favorites", and have them be displayed first.
Progress is progress... but is this really the only update since two weeks ago? How many are developing this website? I've seen some indie projects work faster than this...
Adding to the chorus of people saying the obvious, that allowing users to sort their own list is preferable.
I understand the need to sell products, and the role that profit plays in the longevity of this service. So if you leave the products section as a full list of products sorted by most recent first in order to give attention to current marketing efforts, then maybe at least give us better UX by stying books we own and books we don't own differently. That would make the list more skimmable for users trying to find what they own, but also probably increase sales slightly by calling out the items we haven't yet bought and prodding the completionists.
If you keep the list of source books sorted by most recent and popularity, then please add a user sorted list of source books under the collections part of the menu.
Finally, when you make these changes to the mobile / hamburger menu, please stop using line-height when you should be using margins. It looks silly. Margin collapse exists for this very reason.
Their dev time has from what I gather been slowed drastically cause of the acquisition.
Thank you.
I suggest sorting filters : By release date, By title (A-Z), with a checkbox to see only the products we own.
Under Featured Sourcebooks, I feel the Sage Advice Compendium should have its own spot under or above "View all sources"... Instead of "free", subtitle could be "Official Rulings (Q&A)" or something like that. (i.e. it's not a sourcebook).
While I think about it, can we have the top menus (D&D Beyond bar and Collections, Game Rules, Sources, etc.) stuck to the top of the page so that when you scroll down in a page, you can easily hit the search box or other options. Maybe even the same with the the breadcrumbs for ease of navigation.
biggest thing I want is a filter for ONLY books I own on DnD Beyond when im looking up items and monsters. Its so annoying to either have to sift through content I cant look at or manually input my books each time do a search