Affinity sites crosslinking: a major UX fail

[Petr Stanicek]

All Affinity products, including this forum and the Spotlight magazine, are missing links to the Affinity home & product pages. There is a splash screen in Designer with links to this forum, to the social media, to the Spotlight web – but there is no link to the Affinity home page, to the product pages, it's barely impossible to find Release news and other core infornation. Even the "About" window within apps, even the Spotlight web are missing such link... The user has to google your homepage, that's insane. I consider this a major UX fail.

[Granddaddy]

To expand on this topic, depending on Internet search engines is a gamble for any company. I wanted to log into the Affinity Store to download my copy of Affinity Publisher that I ordered under the pre-order offer. So I searched Bing for Affinity Photo store. The first hit on the Bing result page is for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Next are pages for a course on Affinity from a private company, followed by the Microsoft Store, and finally the Affinity home page for the U. S. Then follows the Affinity store page,  not for the U. S. but for Great Britain. Then follows the Mac App Store and the Microsoft Store. So on the 1st page of hits I still have not found the Affinity Store for the U. S.

DuckDuckGo returns results similar to Bing with the Affinity Store for the U. S. not appearing on the first page of hits.

Google, which I avoid using, does return the Affinity Store for the U. S. as the first hit and the U. S. Affinity home page as the second hit. Kudos to Google in this case.

I have found that Bing and Google often return quite different results. Often Google returns a first page filled with sponsored links rather than with valid search results. It's often best to use more than one search engine rather than assuming your favorite engine is retrieving what you need. Google especially, but no doubt the others also, have their own agendas when you submit to using them. They do not care so much about providing you with what is available on your topic. Rather they want to direct you to sites related to your topic that fulfill their goals. Your goals are secondary.They are not impartial indexing services of the kind that you could find in libraries decades ago.

So I agree with @Petr Stanicek that Serif could make it more convenient for users to find Affinity web sites so as to avoid sending us to Internet search engines. Other software does include links to their own sites in the Help menu or on the Welcome screen or both.