The directory gets a front page
Until today the directory opened on a grid of nine tiles: a label, a big number and a line of text for each section. It told you how much was in there and nothing about what. You had to pick a section and scroll before you saw a single aircraft or ship.
The landing now leads with things you can look at.
Search first
The search box sits at the top, right under the title. Under it are a few "Try" chips with real type codes, so one tap shows what a result looks like. On the right are three cards fanned out: the rarest aircraft types our receivers have heard. Rarest means the highest tier first, and inside a tier, the type with the fewest different airframes heard. An Antonov An-124 heard once beats a 747 heard three times.
Four numbers, two lanes
Below the hero are four counts: aircraft types heard, airframes caught, vessels caught and airports the network hears flights to or from. A count we failed to read is left out rather than shown as zero.
Then the two lanes, side by side on a wide screen and stacked on a phone. Aircraft (blue) lists types, manufacturers, airlines, airframes and airports. Ships (teal) lists vessels, flag states, shipyards and ports. Each row has its count on the right and opens its section. Under each lane is a small shelf: the rarest types for aircraft, the three longest hulls players have caught for ships. Hull lengths come from AIS, and anything longer than 460 m is a broken dimension, so it never makes the shelf.
How rare is rare
A new block shows how the cards split across the six tiers, one bar for aircraft types and one for caught vessels, with a colour legend. Common fills most of both bars and mythical is a thin sliver at the end.
Recently caught
The last block lists the six newest catches across both lanes, aircraft and ships mixed, newest first, each linking to its own page.
Photos on these cards come through our own server, the same way as on the section cards, and a card without a photo shows the drawn outline of its type or ship category. Credits stay on the picture.
The page costs the server nothing extra. Everything on it is built from the lists the directory already reads to count its sections.
Two steps are left in this redesign: category bars and tier chips on the section pages, and an airlines hub with logos.