Unfortunately chiming in here, Pass holder using Roku…
The Positive
I like the fact that there’s now an easily-accessible “entire season” poster at the beginning of each season, mostly because I rewatch a lot of TV shows and that makes it much easier to mark a whole season unwatched so it’ll keep my place without having to do the entire series.
There’s clearly been some nice visual work put into making the graphics for each video/item backgrounds more attractive and seamless, which ain’t bad. (I’m talking about things like the preview images/trailers for movies and TV shows, not the actual interface itself.)
The Negative
Pretty much everything to do with navigation, as tons of people above have already said. Genuinely baffled by several UI decisions made here. Two stacked horizontal menus on top, but a massive amount of unused blank space in the column on the left? One of those horizontal menus required because the user can’t decide whether they want to have easy access to things like “Live TV” (which I don’t watch) or “On Demand” (which I don’t use) and has no option to turn those off, so they need to take up space? Libraries, a category that is almost always going to have 4+ items in it, now being a horizontal bar the user has to click to cause to appear AND SCROLL because it can’t display more than 4 at a time, while the left column goes completely unused until you actually enter a library, where even then it will always have only 4 items?
There’s a serious sacrifice of function to form going on here - it feels like these elements were updated with the goal of creating a modern look and incorporating empty space first, and to be optimally useful to users actually trying to use them a very distant second.
I’m mindful that it’s likely that there’s an attempt being made here to keep the UI consistent across different platforms, which is good practice for helping users recognize what they’re looking at and more easily switch between them without having to learn new app quirks on each platform, so it’s possible this is something that happens to be especially poor for using a TV remote but more palatable if you’re on a different device. But then again, I can’t imagine I’ll be having a ton more fun with this on a browser. I’d love to see some stats on which platforms were considered the “base” ones - i.e., is this design meant for smartphone OS’s primarily, thus explaining the obnoxious scrolling bar up top since finger-swiping will move things faster than a traditional mouse or, god forbid, remote will? It feels like this can’t be something that anyone designed to be easy to use on Roku, because hoo boy. (To be clear, I don’t think the issues above are good for phone UI design, either, but at least I can sort of see the reasoning.)
It’s my understanding that this is essentially a full reiteration of the app, not just a UI change, so I doubt that it’s possible to roll it back, as so many other commenters here are calling for. But I think some of these decisions definitely need to be looked at again, and that users are going to want and need more ability to customize the layout if they want to. Your power user who has twenty-five libraries on their server is going to have different needs from your casual user who watches TV on their phone or on their lunch break on the iPad their granddaughter bought them for Christmas. By all means, let people configure their app to look like this if they want to. Hell, even leave it as the default - I don’t like having to do the extra work but I recognize that I will and CAN, whereas the grandmother in the example above probably can’t and would benefit from the default being more tailored to her needs. But let people use/configure the layout so that it works for them if they want to. I promise you, not enough of them are going to click on “Discover” and subsequently Plex content out of annoyance that they can’t find where anything is because the second bar hasn’t dropped down to make any statistical impact.
Empty side bar, double top bar. Unbelievable. Still can’t get past that one.
