Suggestion for more consistent UI

Feature Suggestions
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1

I’m glad you guys embraced the UI where you can scroll through different rows of media where each row represents a theme or category. This is a common UI approach with many media software these days like Amazon Prime, Netflix, and others.

In case of Plex, though, when you go to a specific library, you are then presented with 3 possible UIs. Recommended follows the same UI theme as above, Library shows all media in a grid where you scroll down to see more, and Playlists shows individual playlists which you then see a list of media under a selected playlist.

Imagine a user who would like to look up a specific movie which starts with the letter M. After moving right from the selected library, you may have to scroll up to the top in case the screen is showing Recommended, then move right, and then OK. Then down, then down until letter M, then OK, then left, then scan the screen to see if you see it, if yes, you may have to go right… or possibly down, and continue to go down, until you see it, then right or left.

Instead of the current approach, what if all the media in the library is displayed in rows. The first rows will be as they normally are under Recommended, then rows after that after possibly Playlists, and then after Playlists, all media where each row is for media starting with a specific letter of the alphabet.

As an example, the rows would be grouped as follows:

Recently Added Movies
Continue Watching
Top Movies in Crime
Top Movies with Bill Nighy
Top Unplayed Movies
Recently Played Movies
Favorite Actors - Sean Penn
Favorite Actors - Willem Dafoe
Movies (ie, playlist called movies)
A
C
D
F
I
L
M etc

As mentioned each row would show the media’s posters in the row, so even Playlists would follow the same UI paradigm. That means from this view, it is possible to see easily see the contents of the playlist instead of a single image which combines the image of 4 different media within the playlist.

From a usability point of view to view a movie which starts with the letter M, from the library in the left navigation, move right, then down until letter M, then right until finding the movie.

No more scrolling up to change from Recommended to Library to Playlists… and a much more consistent UI experience.

And…

If you want to take it one step further… The new Netflix UI provides a little more detail about the highlighted show/movie.

For the fire-tv interface, I see you’ve recently adopted the single row approach for TV shows, so I think this is a step in the right direction.

For TV shows, you place additional information below the row… Per my other post about improving the usability of knowing what is selected, I still prefer the new Netflix UI. There’s no confusion about what is selected. Then there’d be potentially empty space on the screen for the TV show… But then you could show different seasons as different rows, rather than the awkward moving up to select the Season to change which season you want to see. (Awkward since it doesn’t fit with the multiple row UI paradigm). And it is true that for shows which have only one season, there’d be some empty space, but we shouldn’t be afraid of empty space if it is consistent and besides, there’s still the show background being shown.

2

I don’t often speak against a feature request, but I feel I must on this one, respectfully.

One of the reasons for having the ‘Recommended’ and ‘Library’ tabs is because too many users (myself included) didn’t like having to push through all the ‘Recently added,’ ‘Top unplayed,’ and other hubs to get to our alphabetically-sorted (or whichever sorting method we chose) media. Those tabs, together with the option to remember which tab is selected, were a sea change in the Plex UI, in a very positive way.

The idea of having all the movies starting with ‘M’ on one row, and having to scroll sideways to find a specific movie, is also something that Plex tried, and it met with such vehement opposition that they thankfully abandoned it. Horizontal scrolling is grossly inefficient and a horrible design choice, from a usability standpoint. It’s easily the worst think about Netflix’s website, new or old.

Even now you can find several threads of people complaining about the recent change to horizontal scrolling in the TV libraries. They’ve already told us that they’re changing it back to a grid layout.

What you’re asking for here is actually a major step backward, and eliminating features that make Plex more flexible, and more useable for a greater variety of people.

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3

I agree with that comment.

I think the Netflix UI is very deliberately designed to ever keep you from seeing the whole library, to keep you from noticing that things come and go, and how remarkably bad 90% of the content is.

With Plex, I basically either:

  1. Continue watching a show I’m already watching
  2. Watch a recently added show
  3. Sort or search for a specific title by name

If I’m “looking for something to watch” I’m likely to lose attention before I get around to picking anything, and I end up playing with my phone instead.

I haven’t really thought about what would improve “discoverability”. Interesting thought.

Exactly which movies with Bill Nighy aren’t “Top Movies”?!

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4

I might be misunderstanding but I just want to be clear that what I said in another topic about going back to grid was only about the Collections View in the Android TV app. I don’t know if something was said someplace else but I have no info about the TV season screen being a grid.

5

You’re right, I was mistaken about where it was.

6

Unfortunately, I don’t have any knowledge about how that interface looked when you would scroll sideways to find a movie for a specific letter. One of the interfaces I recall is when there were two rows but otherwise everything required horizontal which was bad, but only because of the two rows.

Plex will have to keep in mind who the target audience is and who they are targeting, especially for future expansion. I think there is a limit to the number of geeks who want to use Plex and so the opportunity is among non-geeks which also mean non-technical people. I can’t definitively say what is the best UI but considering Netflix, Amazon FireTV, Google TV, and many other apps running on these platforms have moved to the horizontal scrolling for a reason. Can it be improved upon? I hope so, but I would argue that staying static is not the answer, so I hope Plex can continue to improve its UI. In the meantime, I’ll need to explain to my mom over and over and over and over again how to find something in Plex.

7

I would never give any of those services as examples for having really good user interfaces. Have you ever tried to find something in your video library in Fire TV? One side-scrolling ribbon sorted in order of purchase. This totally sucks rocks. Browsing in a ribbon is painful no matter what. I pretty much hate browsing in all of those services.

You might be surprised to know if you view your video library on Amazon’s web site, it uses a grid, not a ribbon. So, I don’t think this is a settled UI/UX approach at all. As someone else suggests, it might have reasons rooted in other ulterior motives.

As Pinterest has made painfully obvious, people love to browse long flowing grids of pretty pictures.

8

Not to prolong a discussion if people are not interested in it, but I would agree that a good UI has not been settled, just that so far, the single-row ribbon approach seems to be taking favor. I am also not a fan necessarily of how Amazon has done their interface. While Amazon has decided on a grid for an entire video library, if the video library is large enough, to me this is also not desirable. I’m not advocating though replacing the grid fhe entire video library by a single row.

I’m not a fan of how Amazon and Netflix has defined their rows, but for changing media, it makes sense that they provide rows where you can discover new videos. Defining rows by genres, “recommendations”, and in particular, similar movies by either theme of the movie or popular actor/actresses are useful for discovery.

By having a “recommended” view, this is the same type of concept of “discovery” to help people find what media they may be interested in watching faster than searching the traditional way. Otherwise, there would be no point in these views at all. I just wish that the other views could be more consistent with the recommended watching views. (I believe playlists could be improved by showing content of each specific playlist in a single ribbon. For TV app, it would be the same number of clicks to get to a view, just that the UI would be consistent.)

I agree that grids may be useful when browsing more of an infinite list, but not ideal when looking for something specific in a more finite list even with big libraries.

9

I think that we are probably in agreement somewhat.

If you are on the recommendations page of a library or something similar, then I agree it makes sense, because if you have different categories like “recently released”, “popular right now”, “specific genre”, then a grid for each category is potentially problematic because the user has to scroll down to see and may never reach the other categories if the grid for any given category is too long. Plex tries to deal with this by making the category titles clickable so you can get a more detailed grid if you are interesting (although they are not consistent in letting you know about this).

The issue I have with ribbons is that when I am browsing something specific, like the artists in my music library. When I drill down into an particular artist, they switched to a more “recommendation-style” page for the artist, where I no longer saw my artist albums in a grid. They have since backtracked on this after lots of complaints, but they still don’t solve it completely, they just introduced a finite grid (up to 16, I think) that can be expanded if the artist has more albums.

So, in this instance, they have mixed the “recommendation” page with the grid page. Like you, I think this is inconsistent and have previously suggested that they do the same thing as the library page and have tabs for “recommendation” and “library” with defaults, so that people who want recommendations can see them and people who don’t won’t, but both could still be accessible for the occasions where you do want to peek at the other.

10

Interesting discussion, I think the benefit of the Netflix style UI is that users are navigating their content along two dimensions, category and movies within a category and the controls to do so are obvious on sight. My four year old with limited reading skills can figure it out.

The grid while allowing for better browsing of content within a category is combersome to switch between them. One idea is to have categories listed at the top horizontally that users can navigate across. But also when a user gets to the left or right edge of the grid going further left/right navigates to the next category and back. There would be UI indicators for this and the fast forward/rewind buttons on a remote could be mapped to category navigation.

There may be other hybrid models but it sounds to me like content navigation is primary for most users and category is secondary but should still have a decent ux and not be an after thought like the straight grid view.