What is the most appropriate way to ask a user to select a few (10 for example) categories from a list of thousands to proceed with the app?

Question

I am working on a mobile app which relies on the categories/themes of interest chosen by the user and show content accordingly.

These categories are coming from another website and are similar to the numerous Stack Exchange sites, i.e., you must choose what content you have to see. In my case, the overall number of categories could be 1000s, however many of them may have overlapping content.

The idea is to have the user select a minimum of 10 such categories before moving to the main app content. The content is based on the user's selections.

How can I let the user begin exploring the app's content without taking a lot of time with selection of categories?

I am currently showing the whole list to the user. However, since the list is huge, I feel like the user may lose interest before even starting.

Answer 1

I would suggest creating a short list of broad "top-level categories" that every other category can be grouped into (maybe around 20 of them). For example:

Technology, Art, Leisure, etc.

Then (painfully) link your thousands of categories to those top-level categories.

That way, when the user signs up, they can pick which of those handful of top-level categories interest them. Then you can automatically assign all related categories to that user (or limit it to a random subset if you don't want too many).

I would then suggest that a feature of the application is that when showing content to the user, they can clearly see the original category and provide an easy option for them to "unsubscribe" if they don't like that content.

Yes, it's a lot of work for you in the back end, but that's your selling point - you do the heavy lifting, so that the user doesn't have to.

Answer 2

This is a frame challenge. What you ask for is impossible.

If you require users to select ten categories of interest before you let them access the app, most users will not proceed beyond that step. No UX polishing can fix this.

The few people who get past this will have chosen ten categories quickly, without much thought. They will have missed categories they are really interested in, and included categories they are only marginally interested in. Again, no UX polishing can fix this.

I think you should rethink your whole approach.

Answer 3

This sounds like a job for a type-ahead -- the user starts typing a category of interest, and the system returns valid responses that can then be selected.

Bonus points if you account for fuzzy spelling or can link the user to synonyms.

Answer 4

Browse by popular categories

In addition to the other answers, I'd also recommend enabling the user to view which categories are the most popular, based on statistics of your user base.

This will empower users to be able to quickly get value from your service—before they lose interest—by choosing from categories that are already successful in your app.

You do the discovery for them: provide intelligent recommendations

If you're feeling a bit more advanced, perhaps you could get into providing recommendations, based on communities the user is already a part of. This could also be done by using the statistics of your user base to find groups of categories that typically are subscribed to together.

Answer 5

Do your users really need to select all 10 categories at the beginning? Maybe you can let them select 3-5 categories and gradually introduce them to select more.

If you collect enough data, you can try to suggest something like: "Users who are interested in Category 1 also choose these Categories"

Asking users to select too many options at once will most likely lead to choice overload right at the beginning of their journey.

Answer 6

Depending if this is applicable to your subject matter you could take a hint from some music streaming applications: instead of asking if you like Pop, or R&B or Jazz or Classical, they ask some of your favorite artists and then deduce (or propose) some categories from that. I think Apple Music's setup starts like that.

Again, it is hard to say if this approach would fit your use case or not without knowing what which sort of content we are dealing with.

Answer 7

There are a number of assumptions that need to be considered when addressing a pattern like this.

1. why is the user adopting your app?
2. how did they arrive at your app?
3. what happens if they try to skip category selection?
4. how confident are you that the user and the app describe categories the same way?
5. can we employ some form of behavioral analysis to surface more applicable categories?
6. Do your users have an opinion on 1000 possibilities? Do they demonstrate any behavior around this list? Can you quantify a preference for items at the top of the list vs items it the bottom?
7. what happens if the user only selects 5 items, or just one? Is there anything to suggest that 10 categories results on a better experience than 9 or 5 or 1?

These are all questions that draw focus back to putting the user and their considerations at the center of the solution. I have often received a recommendation for a curation product and dropped in and had no idea how to proceed. In situations where I was unfamiliar with the options available to me, I often appreciate a general suggested or what's trending now playlist. As my familiarity with the product increases, I can do more exploration and adopt new relationships to people, groups and topics.

But my suggestion is that you take some effort to test your 1000 item list with users and see how they react to it. Make a cheap prototype with a skip button on it, and see how often users try to skip it. Results from these experiments in the context of your user, with your interface, and your content will give you much better results than suggestions from our limited point of view.