First impressions:
Do Like:
- It’s pretty
- I like the individual episode/movie screens, they are clean and the artwork is presented well
Do NOT Like:
- Upon open, the active button is Home, and not the next item in Continue Watching.
- Top Nav. Things should be listed Vertically, and not Horizontally
- General Nav: I do not like that my libraries aren’t listed front and center. I have to click to get to them. They are also listed horizontally, and take an additional click to start looking at.
- Libraries do not autopopulate when selected, they require yet another click, Can these be reordered?
- Finally a left hand nav appears when I select a library, which is frustrating because that’s where I’d want selections to be the whole time
- I really do miss everything being in a nice row on the left in the order that I preferred, now I have to dig for things
- LiveTV: I fell in love with the combined Air and Plex channels as Favorites, I complained about this on launch, but I grew to appreciate it, and I miss it now that it’s gone
Overall:
Please take this kindly, but you really borked the overall navigational/browsing/content selection experience. This might be OK on a handheld device, but on a TV, with way more real estate it seems you’ve added layers and clicks where it used to feel more seamless.
The Roku experience as it is, is the closest thing you’ve come to the original Roku experience that existed when I started nearly 10 years ago, which was my absolute favorite. It was stripped down, no frills, left nav, easy to use. Today, the extra bits are in there, but they can be organized out of the way, and it’s just easy to use once you’ve tweaked it a bit.
This New Experience… again, doesn’t feel like it’s built with a TV in mind. I get wanting to unify the codebase, but sometimes… a vertical device needs vertical solutions, and a horizontal device needs horizontal solutions. It’s hard to imagine a one size fits all nav experience when I’m thinking about handhelds vs. tabletops.
I REALLY miss Music and Photos. That’s primarily how I play music in the house.
This reminds me heavily of that hot mess we got before Uno rolled out (top nav, categories, combined libraries)… which was also supposed to be the Plex unifying experience. Uno was… and it was better than this. I’m a pretty vocal poster when things go wrong, and if I’m not complaining, you’re probably doing a fine job. Maybe I need to be more vocal about that?
