How to include 2 different types of user behavior on a dashboard / home?

Question

So I'm currently facing a problem where a logged-in user should be able to do 2 (completely) different actions on 1 page (view):

1. Browse products

2. Respond to "product-requests" (searches from other users)

Is it possible, based on your experience, to enable these completely opposite kinds of behavior in one view, without lowering priority for one of them?

Or should you always create focus for the user and focus on 1 primary intended action and make the other behavior secondary?

One of the ideas I had, was making a clear distinction in the scroll-direction for the different types of behavior.

Where the requests can be seen as an inbox, you can go through horionztally at the top of your view: Giving you the opportunity to skip them easily or respond to them.

And if you want to browse, you scroll vertically a well-known pattern for endless browsing, giving the opportunity to add a "infinite scroll"-feel to the list of products.

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Answer 1

From your description I can assume that, you want equal importance for both the features, and you don't want to hide the feature behind tabs/screens, they should be able to browse the lists right away.

I will also assume that there is no need to view both the lists simultaneously. This makes it critical to show only one list at a time, since screen real estate is critical on mobile.

I like the idea of having different scroll directions, which works well for the "Browse products" list. But it has some limitations. Browsing products is smooth, since scrolling down will get rid of the inbox section, but while browsing inbox, products is always visible, and it won't allow you to utilize the complete screen.

I have some ideas.

The first solution are basic tabs to distinguish both the lists.

The second option uses horizontal scroll to show the first few results from both the list to tie in the user, and provides see all button at the end to expand the list.

I would be glad to hear your thoughts on this.