I wonder if this violates the ADA Accessibility Standards.
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That is one of things that annoy me so much. The old version did it better.
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What does DEI and “woke” have to do with this? Even being one of the staunchest advocates for switching back to the old interface your ridiculous statements make me roll my eyes.
Obviously your mother took Tylenol and vaccinated you frequently.
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LMAO the exec. team is whyte… shut it with your political nonsense
No, they should get sacked, just like the genius that alienated 99% of Bud Light’s customers.
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There’s no reason to bring this political BS into this conversation.
Anheuser-Busch overestimated their customers’ tolerance of modern society. Sadly, they were mistaken.
Plex released an interface change that requires some adjustment, without documenting it at all.
They’re two very different things. The mental gymnastics required to conflate them baffles me.
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Plex automatically “updated” my Roku app tonight and it absolutely sucks. I can no longer delete crap the f-tard software designers addded, and my Music library no longer appears on the page. Navigating the new version requires lots of clicks, and having everything on the top of the page sucks. Clearly, the folks who own Plex are trying to make this a one-size-fits-all, do everything launch page. YOU FAILED MISERABLY!!! I am now hunting for a Plex replacement and will advise anyone who asks to NOT get a Plex Pass. The company is clearlly run by idiots.
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It impacts me as well, and I’ve been complaining for months about it.
The layout is less effective, period. He’s not the only person suffering from it. It’s great that you don’t have an issue and that at worst the layout is “same but different” for you, but for people who organize their media into more categories, it’s a pain. There’s nothing better in the new layout.
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It took me almost a full day’s worth of work to switch to Emby and I had to buy their lifetime pass even though I already had a lifetime Plex pass. Turns out it’s a ton faster because they’re not trying to force a bunch of low budget streaming on me. If I were you, rather than spending any more time trying to get Plex to pay attention to you, I’d invest that time into switching to Jellyfin (free) or Emby now.
It was a big mental hurdle recognizing that Plex doesn’t care about their users after having used their products for over a decade. If you look at all of the activity in their forums you’ll see that so many people are angry with the update and Plex has completely ignored every single one of them.
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Nice of you to respond. May God Bless You.
I wish now that I hadn’t purchased the lifetime Pass. I still may look for other options anyway. Why would you make a change to the app that no one seems to like without giving people an option to use the old menus?? I don’t see that any of the complaints have been addressed and it appears that we are stuck with them. The entire Roku app team should be ■■■■ canned
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Well something else has changed in the last week or so. Now the libraries are still at the top, but a least it’s a drop down lost instead of a side selection.
However I’ve started having lots of playback issues. “My network is too slow” Let’s see what has changed. My back end server? (24core/64GB) no. My network? 5G Mesh? No, my software client. Yes that’s changed. Now I can’t play anything without buffering or messages that it’s too slow.
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The way things used to be. The libraries and home were stacked vertically to the left. This was much cleaner and useful….
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Couldn’t agree more. We use PLEX on Roku for all everyday viewing and the experience is miserable now. Who did you test this on? Any experienced PLEX users or just new users. This is just like Cracker Barrel changing their logo to be “progressive” and nobody liked it. The same thing should happen at PLEX. The person who decided to go with this should be gone.
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Seriously considering the switch too. Been a life time pass member for about 12 years but it’s trash now. No audio-video sync, terrible interface on streaming devices, way too much off host content… Right now the ONLY category that it beats EMBY at, is the ability to stay logged in and to and search to all servers.
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Just stopping by to say I agree 100% with the original poster, and recent tweaks to the library bar have only made things worse. I’d love to invite the UX PM team to watch over my shoulder to see how we experience what they’ve delivered. Building a great UX is hard, but listening to your users should be easy and a daily or weekly habit…
As someone who has worked on commercial software for 20 years I can only wonder if the team that builds the Roku app has a target for increasing usage of search. My wife and I have pretty much given up on navigating libraries like we used to every day, and now use search as our default any time we need something not on the home page.
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Agreed. I hope the Plex team heeds your advice. At least some of it anyway.
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I’ve never seen the Plex product team respond and act on the feedback shared here, which is a shame. Not saying it doesn’t happen, but I’ve never seen it.
The Plex team has an incredible resource in these forums, but it looks like they only use it to reduce their support costs and not as a tool for product discovery or user research. Horse, water, etc…
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That’s too bad. I would have been curious to see what a mock up of your Plex UI would like like. Heck, even it share it on the Plex forums.
But understand what you’re saying. Horse, water, etc…
FWIW, I don’t have a specific UI in mind. What I would like is for the team responsible for the Plex app UI on Roku to understand how my family and I interact with their product.
As the HUNDREDS UPON HUNDREDS of comments in this thread reflect, the recent UI changes negatively impact the user experience. Common actions that used to be easy are now hard. Common actions that used to take a small number of steps now take many, many more steps.
Despite this, all evidence suggests that the Plex design team is made of up talented professionals. They’ve built something good and exciting that many users rely on. What they’re (apparently) missing is the negative impact of their latest experience updates. The best way to build user empathy in a product team is to meet regularly with users and to hear their stories.
I’m not offering a UI. I’m offering my story.
Since I have no reason to believe anyone from Plex will respond or act on this offer, I’ll instead share a book that many successful product teams have read and adapted for their team culture: Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres.
Fingers crossed someone from the Plex team will buy and read this book and consider putting its suggestions into practice. 
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