Summary:
I want to recognize the Plex Dev team for their work on the new Xbox One App. Based on my on my one-sided point of view, I would give the app a 2.5 stars in its present form. I look forward to improvements.
Unfortunately, I also have to explain the new UX to my 83 year old mother who loves Plex. In her retirement community she has been the envy of all her friends. She will hate this update and sadly will likely stop using Plex all together unless I migrate her to Roku. So the app update fails the grandma test.
Rating criteria:
5 stars - awesome work! Do more of this.
4 stars - Love it
3 stars - useable but needs improvement
2 stars - useable but painful
1 star - completely unusable or so cumbersome that it is nearly unusable
Here is my walk-through of the features important to me:
Access to libraries - 1 star: the new UX requires me to locate libraries with server/library combinations in an awkward and difficult to read manner. So if I have multiple movie libraries on different Plex servers I have to scroll through all of these combinations to find the movie library I want to use. Suggested fix: incorporate the basic design of the Win10 Plex app where the user can have the libraries selectable on the left side as icons or in scrollable list view.
Access to large number of Libraries - 1 star: Where I have large numbers of libraries, the new app makes accessing them beyond painful. Having control over how I organize my libraries is one of the best features of Plex. This implementation makes organizing libraries almost useless.
Reliability - 1 star: In 4 days of using the new app it has become unresponsive multiple times, causing me to quit the app and restart. Videos also randomly stop, causing them to be resumed. If I can find a way to reproduce these issues with any consistency I will report them separately.
Media Libraries can point to different media servers - 4 stars: This is a new feature and I like the idea. The implementation is cumbersome due to the “Access to libraries” listed above. I would l gladly give up this feature for easier access to my libraries on a server. My suggestion would be have this in some sort of Settings configuration.
Media Library icons – 2 stars: basically the icons for Movie, TV, Music, Video are too small to be viewable in a ten-foot interface. At a minimum these need to be bigger or have viewable text. As a feature suggestion, allow the user to customize these icons with colors, contrast, or even a different image so that different libraries can stand-out. Even hover text would have been good, though likely difficult to see in a ten-foot experience.
Media Library Icons on the top - 2 stars: In my household, this was a unanimous “I hate it - but will get used to it”. As suggested above, a better implementation would have been to have these on the left side and collapsible like they are with the Win10 Plex App.
Access to media Browse view - 1 star: While viewing the my library the Browse list is discoverable, it is counter intuitive. You have to “remember” to select on the media icon to get to browse mode. Asking the user to “remember” anything without some kind of visual queue is not a good experience. I would suggest using the same “Discover - Browse” selection feature available in the Win10 app instead. This way there is a visual representation and it makes the UX more accessible. The update of the Discover page content when hover on the icon makes this experience even worse.
Toggling from media Browse mode back to media Discover page - 2 stars: When a user is in browse mode for media, getting back to the media Discover page requires getting back to the top of the UI; select Home; toggle to the media icon; select the icon again but remember not to select more than once otherwise you have to start all over again.
Automatically displaying media icon discover page on hover - 2 stars: When the focus is on the media library icon, the library tries automatically display the content of that library. The time lag for this display makes for an awkward experience. Suggested fix, Plex should wait for the user to select the icon before changing the display contents or pre-cache these details for a faster experience. I prefer that the user selects the icon before anything changes.
Browsing the Discover page "Recently … Viewed …. Added …etc) - 4 stars: This is generally a nice improvement from the old UX. Though I am personally not a fan of the carousel interface, I understand why you use it and it makes sense in this context. Other video streaming apps use this as well. The Plex implementation is better.
Media Detail UI - 5 stars: Nice improvement. The Win10 and Roku apps have this and my house-hold really loves this feature with movies and TV shows.
Music Playlists hidden - 2 stars: Music playlists are used every day in my household. Having it buried as a carousel list item in Music is really awkward. Not having an specific selectable playlist icon or recent playlist on the home page is a step backward.
Playlist Display Responsiveness- 5 stars: Playlists display quickly. Especially large playlists, big improvement. The old Xbox One Plex app used to take a lot time to queue up a playlist which was annoying.
Music Playlists Randomly Stop playing- 1 star: Consistently my playlists will simply stop playing. No error displays. You simply have to restart. The old Plex app never had this problem.
Music Play features removed - 1 star: When playing music there used to be two icons for repeating the playlist, song, or album. This feature no long exists. Similarly there was an icon for switching to “shuffle” play from the detail playlist page. Also gone. Yes, I know that you can start a playlist with shuffle but you can’t change to shuffle without going back to the main playlist and restarting.
Recent Play List removed from Home page - 1 star: The Recent Play List feature was removed from the Home page. We used this feature all the time and it’s removal exacerbates the fact that playlists are buried in the music discover page.
Starting a Playlist (incorrect focus) - 3 stars : After selecting a music playlist the UI focus is on the first song in the playlist. IMHO the focus should be on the “Play” icon so that the user can simply start the playlist. Right now to start the playlist, you have to toggle over the Play or Shuffle icon. This is annoying. 99 times out of 100 when I choose a playlist, I simply want to play it.
Screen Saver for Music or idle - 4 stars: I like this feature. Though it does not seem to be very smooth. As a feature suggestion allow the screen saver to be tied to a picture library/folder/playlist. Additionally, it would be nice if the user had some control time interval before the screen saver starts if it starts at all.
Icons in the Browse view of a Library - 3 stars: When Browsing a library there are three icons at the top “Play”, “shuffle”, “change to list, grid, or folders”. I can’t figure out the use of the Play and Shuffle icons in this view and they are in the way of getting to the “change to list, grid, or folders” view. Play simply plays the first file on the list, I can’t imagine using this. Shuffle might get used but makes very little sense in this context.
Media Search Feature - 5 stars: Great feature addition. This may have been available in the old version of the Plex App but I don’t remember seeing it.
Alpha filter - 3 stars: The alpha filter on the right side of the screen feels awkward.
Video Buffering issue - 3 stars: Stuttering when starting a video before the video is fully buffered is annoying. This was an issue in the old Xbox Plex App too. I would have been nice to have this issue fixed.
Server List - 3 stars: Under the user name icon is the ability to see a list of available servers. Though I can’t understand what this feature is for since it is just a list. It seems like this would have been an item under App Setting.
Cache More data with Lazy Loading - 3 stars: The Xbox is a powerful device. It would seems that the Plex app could cache more data locally with lazy loading to provide better responsiveness to the user.
