Feedback on Roku UX changes

Plex Players Streaming Devices
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In a discussion on Reddit, a user put together a very detailed assessment that I feel is an excellent description of a lot of the frustration around the changes to the UX in Roku. I asked to share as I feel this really puts a point to what he describes as “task friction” which I believe is the bigger frustration by many users.

”It also doesn’t flow at all like the native Roku menus. The previous interface didn’t feel like you were in a completely different system.

Key Observations

Task Inflation: Simple 1–2 step flows now take 3–4 steps. That’s a 50–200% increase in friction.

Loss of Direct Shortcuts: The old directional input shortcuts (right/left to jump) are broken.

Context Confusion: Users spend extra time just to figure out where they are in the UI.

Promotional Priority: The interface now emphasizes Plex’s own curated/monetized rows over personal library navigation, which shifts priorities away from user efficiency.

Synthesis

Efficiency (violated): More steps for common tasks.

User Control (weakened): Shortcuts removed, more scrolling required.

Consistency (weakened): Libraries and categories no longer behave predictably.

Minimalism (violated): Personal libraries diluted by Plex promotions.

So quantitatively, yes — the new Roku Plex interface increases task friction by 2–3x in many cases.”

Credit to _crucial_ from the Reddit Forums

A point I have to add that illustrate the same point are the general lag and bugginess. One major drawback for me has been the ~5 second delay per key press when marking shows as watched or unwatched (tested on Ultra, Ultra LT, Roku Express and 4k Streaming Stick). This requires me to stop after each keypress to wait for a response, and when marking several episodes as watched or unwatched, such as in a situation where I fell asleep watching the night before, etc,

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I agree with all of the above

At some point in recent history, I think within the past fifteen years, someone decided that arbitrarily changing user interfaces counted as progress. There are few notions as false as this, yet, it has caught on and seems to spread.

It’s okay to be stagnant. Broadcast Antenna TV remained mostly unchanged for roughly a century. They added color. Then they added more channels (UHF). No one complained that the dial on their TV hadn’t changed in the past few years. No one said “Oh boy I really wish that the dials were in different locations” or “Man I’m sick of looking at this remote control! I wish it looked different.”

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LOL. Thats an accurate assessment. I think additionally, there has not really been any recognition from plex of the massive amount of distaste other than to say “we’re not rolling back.” No - We hear you and want to make it the way you like, not a “we hope to work together to improve your experience… Nothin.

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You summed this up nicely. Plex took a fairly elegant interface and made it almost completely unusable. It’s not just horribly difficult to find things, but it’s buggy and introduces layers of unnecessary complexity.

I’m a long-time Plex user, so I’ll give them a couple of weeks to return to a usable interface, but after that I’ll have to move to another platform.

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Doesn’t really matter now. I’m almost done organizing my libraries into Emby, and I’ve already migrated my primary users. I have Jellyfin running in parallel as a backup plan in case Emby follows Plex down the drain.

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How well does emby work remotely?

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It works just like Plex assuming you pay for it and get Emby Connect. A nice bonus is you don’t have to use Emby Connect, you can just set up a dynamic DNS forwarder if you prefer. The process of setting up users and sharing your libraries is far easier too, it’s like Plex was back in the day. None of this social media wanna-be nonsense, you just create a user and select which libraries you want them to have access to then either give them the credentials or add their Emby Connect email address to their user. I’m loving it so far, my Plex usage has dropped to zero except for music, streaming to my Echo devices still works better with Plex and music management is slighly more polished in Plex.