Why we organised discovery around intent, not format
Every marketplace we looked at sorts by what a thing is. People do not arrive thinking "PDF" — they arrive wanting to learn something. Here is what changed when we built for that instead.
The first version of the marketplace sorted everything by format. Books here, audiobooks there, courses in a third column. It was the obvious structure, it matched how the catalogue was stored, and watching people use it was uncomfortable from the first session.
Nobody arrived wanting a PDF. They arrived wanting to get better at negotiating, or to understand why their team kept missing deadlines, or to fill a commute with something that was not news. The format was a delivery detail they worked out at the end, usually by price and length rather than preference.
So we sorted by the thing people actually said out loud. Read, listen, learn, create, connect, grow. Six words, each of them a verb, each of them something a person might already be thinking before they open a browser tab.
The uncomfortable part is that this makes the catalogue harder to browse if you already know exactly what you want. Someone looking for a specific audiobook now goes through a route designed for someone who does not know what they want yet. We kept format filters for that reason, one level down, and we watch how often they get used.
What changed most was not the navigation. It was what we could put next to a product. Once the organising idea is a goal rather than a file type, a course and a book and a room full of people arguing about the same subject are all reasonable answers to the same question, and they can sit beside each other without the page feeling like a category error.
We are not certain this is right. It costs us the familiarity of a store, and familiarity is worth a lot. But every time we have tested the format-first version against this one, people found something they wanted to read more often, and that is the only number on this page we actually care about.