Plex Just Ruined Their Roku App

[Samurai74]

@BigWheel @Atomatth

@MatthewRoche

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.

Amazon.com

Fingers crossed someone from the Plex team will buy and read this book and consider putting its suggestions into practice.

Thanks for sharing your story.

[walkingbird]

Completely agree. It is awful. It takes me much longer to get to the content I want to get to. I’ve organized my video library by collection. I want a screen back that shows me those collections. Searching for a title at a PC by title can be done with a keyboard, but the Roku is completely remote driven and “typing” is the worst thing you can make a user do.

I see you can FILTER by collection, but I want to be able to choose by visual inspection, with the remote, a collection from a screen full of that library’s collections, and not have to choose one filter at a time from a dropdown. I really really really hate the new app UI. The old one suited my needs MUCH better.