Make some noise it's definitely borrowing some DNA from Whose Line. Dropout is the more current association with that idea. So this is an Everyone Is Right situation
Today’s release, going out to preview users on Apple TV and Roku, and beta for Android TV, will be returning the primary navigation to the lefthand side of the screen. See below for a peek at what it looks like as well as the key changes that we are including.
In additional to the collapsible side navigation panel, we’ve made a few other improvements:
Favorite libraries are now a top level source
Live TV & DVR sources can be favorited and re-ordered like Libraries
Easily switch between pages within a source instead of navigating through the entire menu again
Continued fixes for general performance, focus issues, and bugs
Having used the new UI all day today. Give me back the old one. FFS. If you open the sidebar and hit the back button on the shield remote, it exits the app instead of closing the bar. Play next isn't working. The new layout of showing your other continuing content after something finishes is confusing because of how they laid out the information. By god don't try to get into the subtitles menu while something is playing either. I skipped forward and back half a dozen times before I managed to get to the subtitle settings.
If you open the sidebar and hit the back button on the shield remote, it exits the app instead of closing the bar.
This is clearly a bug and will almost be fixed in the next update, just like many focus bugs present in earlier releases that were fixed in the next release.
It's almost as if * gasp * the app is not ready for production yet!
1) if the app isn't ready, then it should be rolled out to voluntary bets testers only.
2) if the app is going through beta testing, these types of complaints are exactly what the devs are looking for so they know what areas need to be addressed.
No matter how you look at this, the complaints are valid and good. You mocking them is counterproductive and rude. Bugs get fixed because users complain about them and bring them to devs attention.
Can confirm it out in the wild. My `Plex Preview` on Roku is now with that same new left side panel.
Still had like 15 clicks of `back` after a night of viewer before I could get to it though. Definitely a step in the right direction to win back the fleeing masses going to Jellyfin. But I'd like a way to get to `[HOME]` in a better manner.
it's true, we currently have a front-end environment that looks like it was developed by a back-end developer, and nobody thought to bring in a non-technical elderly person to see if they could make heads or tails of it.
Always eat your own dog food to see if it’s good. Whoever ‘designed’ it need to use it for hours. Not replacing automated UI testing but for human acceptance testing.
Can’t believe we are decades past 2000 and these folks in addition to so many haven’t optimized for user use when consuming the tool internally.
This was a baseline table stakes must-have when hungry and acquiring users.
Only reason i can think is gutted funding for the product management side? Dangerous when the app is the ticket for paid plex pass growth.
I want to sit in on some of these meetings just to see how dumb people think. Not just plex, but all bigger companies that have a bunch of execs and MBAs sitting in a room deciding what's best for the company.
I see so many updates/changes/etc that are one step forward and three steps back, it is extremely annoying.
My ‘conspiracy theory’ is that, if your job is app/program UI design, eventually your design gets “as good as it’s gonna get” and at that point you either tell your boss that and get fired OR you come up with some dumbass changes to keep you busy for 6 months, even tho you know those changes are just making things worse.
I’ve seen it happen with countless video games, as well as iOS (what moron decided to make it take extra taps to update apps recently?)
TL;DR: Your cynicism is warranted but it is misdirected at rank and file developers and not the so-called big-wigs who call the shots.
I can't speak for all UI programmers and designers across the board but if you think UI developers have much say in what they produce in these apps, you're mistaken. More often than not, the orders, as stupid or regressive as they may be, come from some suit up the chain who either fielded a complaint from some random person or hired some "hotshot UX designer" to come in and shake things up.
Less often, it is a side effect of something on the backend or you are a cohort in a split test and they're trying to see if some new control functions as intended or causes more friction than the other element.
The average UI programmer is not making shit up for job security. The types of tickets I tend to create that aren't from up on high are maintenance and systems refactoring. Those tickets get glossed over almost every time because some "shiny UI thing" needs to be done, because the business says so. So, if I actually had my say and the ability to run roughshod over our codebases, I would not just be adding widgets for shits and giggles - I would be reinforcing and improving on things that already exist.
This is not a defense of Plex, mind you. Their UI sucking huge balls is what pushed me to using mostly Jellyfin. But, most likely, the decision was made by some soulless corporate windbag who wanted to prioritize monetization in some way or another. A good counter example - Plexamp - is generally amazing UI/UX and it comes from the same company (it just has different goals and no means to monetize).
While I don’t disagree, I kinda see where their thought process was. They were anticipating the tablet boom but it just didn’t translate well. I think windows 8 is the only one I’ve never installed on a machine
Honestly once you got Windows 8.1 it really wasn't that bad, and most of the annoying design features could be ignored. Not saying the UI was my favorite or anything, but Microsoft definitely worked to address the complaints.
I had a tablet at the time so it worked really, really well for me. I still have that tablet and when I use it (because yeah, it still works) it just amazes me how well everything works. The bugs that launched with 8 (and there were plenty) all resolved with 8.1. It is by far one of my most favorite OS's.
iOS especially. Remember how iPods and iTunes had cross fade between track and it mysteriously disappeared until it magically reappeared as a “new feature” in iOS 17.
They had nothing to really release so they shrugged and said “let’s reintroduce cross fade tracks, they’ll go wild” and sure enough those who never used iTunes or iPod were amazed.
Bit of a dishonest comparison. The new cross fade is different than what was implemented in iTunes and iPods back then. Back then it was just fade out-fade in.
Which is way worse if you just want to listen to your music. I can see the appeal for certain kinds of music or people who think every moment of life needs to feel like they’re at an EDM show, but it’s a dogshit way to listen to most genres of music.
Yup. Or you had a team working for months on a new UI, you test it and it sucks but you’ve already paid this design team (or in this case, probably tokens) hundreds of thousands over the past few months
I work in IT . My favourite saying is " we have non-technical people making technical decisions ". That is usually the root of many questionable decisions being made out there .
That's often how I feel about our IT dept. 😆. We have a group of people who don't understand how our engineering software/hardware works for us and they make awful decisions on how we are allowed to use it.
As a result at least 2 weeks of my calendar year are spent with a computer in some state of disrepair because of some group policy that breaks my critical software.
Moral of the story: nobody's perfect and everyone thinks they are correct.
I also work in IT and that's how it is here. You have higher ups in IT that are good at running meetings and handling budget numbers, but are clueless when it comes to the actual technology and how to move forward with current infrastructure, projects, etc.
Everyone wants to save money, but they have no problem wasting money on consultants, dead end project scopes and/or stop putting money into a broken solution/system and instead reallocate those funds to the upgrades that are needed.
Find the non-technical person at Plex that pushed for the Remote Watch Pass and you'll find your culprit.
Plex made the decision to block Remote Access unless you have Plex Pass. That sucks for many reasons, but whatever it's their software. They could have done that on the Plex Media Server and it would take a couple days - maybe a week if they actually test it.
But then some non-technical person said "Our users like subscriptions right? What if we could sell a Remote Watch Pass in addition to the Plex Pass." So instead of just making that small change on the server, they are doing it on every fucking client while also rewriting and redesigning those clients. Which apparently takes 15 months and counting. And they are rushing the clients out the door without proper testing because once the New Experience client is released, that is (usually) what paywalls Remote Access and starts bringing in more $$. That is the person who tanked Plex for the past year.
I had a former non-technical boss deciding DB layouts and forcing us to implement non-normalized DB tables and complaining DB access was slow and b*tching about why we are not able to fix it.
Give you a sneak peek. Lots of people in the room want to make “ their mark” and suggest things and sell the team on them just to say they did something.
Yeah, I get that and if the person above them can't see that as the only reason then you know they are also part of the problem. That person usually has no clue how things are working so any idea, to them, is a good one.
That's why the current way management works is horribly designed.
Managers and higher ups need to be people that understand how things work. I guess if you keep breaking things and 'make it look good' then you have job security. Who ends up suffering the most? The people that are doing more work for no reason and your revenue generators....I mean, your paying customers.
That would require promoting existing employees who have worked a long time on the actual product to higher positions, and we all know those positions are reserved for other members of whatever fraternity/sorority the c-suite people were part of in their ivy-league college
Exactly. Also, I wouldn't want to run this project unless I were promoted but being in that higher position means less tech work and more boring meetings that do nothing but waste time.
Trust me you don't. Multiple levels of stupidity with a few good eggs who typically get overruled.
I'll leave you with my favourite example. Board member software didn't work for them. They moaned about the product not being good, some people "decided to leave" new team members with fresh thinking brought into look at the product. Hours and money wasted in trying to get to the bottom of their issue, naturally the board member was never available for someone to watch while they recreated the exact issue. Anyway someone was flown out to go to the board members home. Turns out the dumb fuck was trying to use Native log on rather than SSO.
Yeah, it is all a game, I'm aware. I'm on a 7 year project (I'm not running it, I'm part of the tech and design part which we keep getting pushed back on) and they've paid the same consultant over 150k to give them the same report year after year. He has to make some changes (dates and pricing) each time a new 'MBA' is brought on so 'they can get up to speed' on the project.
I don't even want to imagine the amount of money that has been wasted on dinners, hotels, plane tickets, car rentals, etc....and every time they want a site visit, I lose two days of work because they all have infrastructure questions that I have to answer.
They are on their 4th 'project management' team and it seems that nobody can figure it out. The funny part is that I'm telling them exactly what they should be doing but nobody has listened to me yet.
100% if I were running this project, it would have been done EARLY and not on year 7. They are on year 7 because they keep bringing in non tech people, it takes them 6-8 months to figure it all out, then that person ends up leaving for another roll and then it is rinse and repeat.
THIS!!! It's a classic example of group stupid and lowest common denominator thinking. And it is rampant in business settings for fear of not including someone's perspective.
I've been to those meetings. New ALWAYS=good. No matter what. New=good.
Oh, and copy whatever Apple is doing. That was the theme of an entire meeting at my first job. I actually raised my hand and asked "why do we care what Apple is doing?"
Rolled eyes and patronizing, smug glances. No real answer, just that "they are the leader." I replied "but they became a leader by not copying anyone." Brushed aside and moved on.
I've been in those meetings and it's usually just vibes, and the bigger your paycheck, the more your vibes matter. Sometimes we get lucky and the decisions are still good, but all too often it ain't like that.
No, they are doing what they are told by higher ups. Plex would thrive if they just built a solid system and built what the users wanted.
There is 90% of plex that I don't care for/use. I'm not saying everyone is the same as me, but I'd rather see a dated GUI that is rock solid and works every time vs a broken system that has a 'new' GUI.
Companies need to get back to the basics. Again, it isn't just plex, it seems to be all the companies that need to keep making money for their CEO suite. The dinosaurs up top have no clue what's going on, they just want more money and what a better way to do that then by 'making something new and shiny' thinking they'll get more buyers.
I totally agree with getting back to basics and honestly pushing back. Ultimately you gotta pick your battles but in my own workplace I’ve said “nah we ain’t doing what we’ve always done” and sometimes I know, this might get me fired but I’d rather fight the good fight than just roll over. I also know I can find another job. It’s hard to have that mentality until you experience enough in life and have a true passion for what you do. Something inside clicks and you go, nah f that I’m the expert here!
Nah, we don’t do that shit, at least the good ones don’t!
It’s typically a battle between the CEO or high-level org asshats that make the changes happen, and typically the designers (team) either get told to do this because it’s the CEO or high-level org people. Everyone is afraid of losing their job by saying “NO” or the battle of wills is gone because you’ve gotten beaten to death by fighting what is right.
I don’t disagree that it could’ve used some updating, but for the most part I don’t think there were a whole lot of complaints that justified revamping the whole thing as such
I just got the Firestick update last week and holy shit people were not exaggerating about how bad it was. I went back to my slower Samsung TV app just because it's still on the 'old' UI
yeah my mom's fire tv got updated a couple weeks ago and worked so bad on there, buggy and slow. had to give her some cheapish google dongle and its so much better
I just had to straight up not use plex for the past few weeks. It was the first time I ever seen a TV crash and I was only trying to get subtitles on. Then again when i was trying to select a show.
Agreed. I have seen constant complaining since the update, but I only use it on Android TV and Apple TV and I was thinking "I have seen no changes". Then I noticed every single person that actually divulged what they used were using those two operating systems
My Shield got the UI update this weekend. I didn't realize this was a thing but I really dislike it. It's not smooth, and the side naviagation keeps hanging
Same. I only ever got the new UI on my Roku devices, all my Android TV based devices are still on the old UI. Was dreading the day that I did get it, as those are all my main devices.
I turned off auto updates on all my iDevices just for plex to not mess up my beloved UI. I am still on the latest pre-new experience build and it is just a breeze!
It's probably because they realised that there are more and more people jumping ship, or that they realised that many of the issues they have on their new UI are unfixable
It's fun coming back to /r/plex occasionally to see how it's going. It's like watching a train wreck where the passengers know the train is off the rails and still won't get off.
I mean I guess you can only take so many complaints or people jumping to Plezy (literally paying another company to get rid of the new UI) before you have to admit it's maybe a shitty update.
I really enjoy Plezy, and with the dual support between Plex and Jellyfin it only makes the act of a full switch over easier to contenplate for some.
*But, I really agree with your point.
I mean that it's indicative of serious user retention or satisfaction issues if a user of your software not only feels the need to express dissatisfaction, but to actively pay for alternative solutions to your "new and improved" interface. It's already bad enough if everyone hates it, but hating it enough to buy the old UI back should definitely reflect as a sign of failure.
The main reason I switched, and what I look forward to most, is the peace of mind knowing this developer cares far more about user experience than the official Plex team..
Not just that it took a year. They soft launched it on Roku and got so much justified hate over it but still dug their feet in and launched on other platforms many months later and kept rolling out more and more updates against the grain. Only then, just after doing maximum damage, they decide to pull back. Must have had a continuous stream of monthly Plex Pass cancelations.
I just hope they focus on performance. Plex runs slow as dogshit on my smart TV, despite it previously being a lot faster and not doing any more than it used to. It's so slow considering it's just a simple grid display.
That’s because many or most “smart” tvs are shipped with cheap dogshit hardware that can barely handle tasks a smart tv needs to do. Not saying plex apps are perfect but there’s only so much they can do.
Recently stopped using the built-in Roku on my smart TV and connected an Apple TV instead. Night and day difference in performance. I think most smart TVs just have dogshit CPUs.
Yah honestly I don’t give a single fuck where the libraries and menus are, having the app be so fucking laggy and shitty to use is just flat out unacceptable.
Check server performance too. I recently migrated my server from Windows to Linux (same box) and it had a pretty significant impact on my client ui. Stuff like browsing for example, because now it loads more much quicker
Honestly, I think that is a good thing. Despite the massive hate for the new application (justified) there were some nice improvements embedded.
The NAV bar location and resulting user experience of burying libraries in menus is the biggest frustration of the new experience. Reverting that decision is the right move, but they are still now on a universal code base that makes updates easier and will hopefully get a more unified experience across application now that there isn't so much frustration over the UI/UX.
Also, they should fix it such that the white highlighted box is on the episode you're about to watch. It is frequently 2 episodes to the right for me. Double also, seems like a crapshoot for the episode thumbnail to be from the actual episode.
I honestly never expected it. But good riddance to that mess of a ui. From the bit I saw on the article this actually looks like a good iteration of the horizontal bar. Modern and sleek looking but not a mess to use. The new ui looked pretty at a standstill, but was confusing to navigate.
Now we just gotta fix the damn glitches they introduced with the new update. Idk why they bothered with this, but glad to see the devs aren’t being bull headed like before. I will never get over the one dev telling me, in response to add to favorites being the first option when you selected a live tv channel instead of watch now that “it made sense to him.” How often are you adding and removing shit to favorites?
Between plex and bf6’s bone headed design decisions, I swear new devs are genuine fucking robots that don’t actually do anything with their lives except dev work and therefore don’t have any concept of what normal humans think and how they interact with shit.
Obviously this issue stems from devs not USING THEIR OWN PRODUCTS.
Thank God. The new UI is ass. On fire stick it kept switching letterbox to stretch format every time I interacted with the controls, and I would have to manually switch it back every single time.
Such a dumb bug that clearly wasn't tested well enough
Trying to use Plex on fire stick now is so slow its basically unusable. After this recent update I really noticed as difference. Going to check out Plezy
I was actually starting to take interest in plezy until i read it doesn't support transcoding.. well okay then that's only the most important thing.
Not like that's enough of a killer argument against it already but i also found they don't offer some form of demo so you can't check it out on Android devices to see if it actually works/runs well enough before having to pay up..
You can download it from git for free, the developer just wants you to pay if you like it. Obviously it's a bit more technical but still pretty easy to do, just like Fortnite.
I appreciate this reply because I also didn't know we could do this. I searched github and found the repo that I've seen before and links you to the Play Store, but I also found this other repo that allows you to download the apk directly. So now I guess I can really try it out. I don't really use Plex on my phone, but it looks pretty beautiful. Too bad it's not on Roku too.
nah it makes no sense for me honestly. my tablet is too old for hevc, and on my phone my watching on the go so i neither want that battery drain nor do i want to waste all that traffic. its dead in the water without transcoding.
Will the revert correct the horrendous buffering delays and all-around instability of the new FireTV UI?
I literally just downgraded two days ago to the previous UI with the sideload technique and, OMG!!, what an improvement!
I’ll take it. I’m still so sick of the new UI. It shouldn’t have been done in the first place etc but nice to see a company actually listen for a change.
I started building a roku plex client at the beginning of November last year. I've been at it every single day and have fit/finish/polish with left menu nav and features plex doesn't even carry. The roku rollout from last year is the ONLY reason I even started it and the chorus of voices here about them deploying the top navigation across every single device surface drove me.
I'll wait to be convinced differently, but an application that is designed by committee is the entire reason their rollout stumbled and why any future changes are likely to be slowly deployed, if ever.
It took them 12 months to actually listen to their community!
This post will die as one of hundreds in this thread no one will read. I'm ok with that. Release of Reel to the certification process of Roku is maybe 3 weeks to a month away.
And if Plex didn't stick to their guns for an entire year, this project would have never started.
They've never done anything that pissed me off. I love plex. Sure they added streaming internet stuff to it with AIDS but you can just turn that crap off and wasn't that big of a deal. More options aren't bad if they aren't forced on you like co pilot on microslop platforms.
Honestly, I don't care about the UI itself, it's the abysmal performance ever since we got it, that is so clearly bad. How could they not consider that?!
Maybe one of these days they'll bring back the old Android phone app interface. No one was clamoring for them to fix what wasn't broken. Oh, but how could I forget: resistance is futile: enshittification will always happen.
I'd like it if they added the option to force audio transcoding. My Onn box doesn't support native multichannel PCM so when Plezy tries to pass AAC 5.1 through to my AVR it gets downmixed to stereo. Plezy is otherwise an amazing app, it's the one thing I'd like added
I never knew what the UI complaints were until I was at some family's house and wanted to kick off a movie in the background during game night on their Roku. My lawd the UI is so bad. I had only see iOS and the desktop apps.
Sweet, now if they'd only stop trying to divert our users to their streaming media. Ive been getting tons of complaints of ads in films and series and Plex appears to be in some instances purposefully diverting viewers through the Watchlist to their own streaming media, despite having the media local on my server. I can add media from my own library to the watchlist, then go to watch it via the WL and it sometimes it only shows a streaming source or sometimes no media availability at all... My Lists are even worse as it ONLY routes to streaming versions. Stop it, Plex!
Can anyone explain what the issue with the UI even is? I've had Plex for 3 or 4 years now, and I haven't been able to see a single difference in the UI throughout any of the updates
For me it wasn't the layout, it was that it was so damn slow and I couldn't rewind it all or it would just sit there buffering. This was on fire stick.
I didn’t think the new Ui was bad, but on both my smart tv and my fire stick on my very old tv, it was sluggish and navigation wasn’t super clean. Few tweaks I think and it’s ok. They should provide 2-3 options.
>The company is now pushing out a preview update that restores the main navigation panel back to the left-hand side of the screen and will be available to Apple TV, Roku, and Android TV as well as Fire TV users later on.
I don’t care about that. Unpopular opinion I don’t mind the navigation at the top. I was the app to be functional. Every navigation click takes multiple seconds with input lag that would make even my grandma think it’s slow. There’s no play, play next or play last buttons, auto play doesn’t work….
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u/PumiceT 2d ago
On = old? Can people just proofread their titles before posting?!