You want snark? Okay, grandmum prefers the discs by mail, but she’d really rather have her VHS tapes of old Jimmy Stewart movies. In fact, the “very polite cable upgrade man” accidentally bypassed her DVD player and she went without movies for a year before she had the nerve to tell us. “Well, I knew you’d want to come fix it, and he was such a nice man, I thought he might feel bad…”
I keep trying to sell her on Netflix streaming, but she won’t use it. “Oh, it just seems so complicated, having to push a button and go to a menu, and what if I pushed the wrong button and broke it? I could never face that cable man again! And then I’d have all these electrons zapping around, probably right through my cat… poor Mr. Beauregard.”
I finally gave up… and might have said “You really do just want analog entertainment. Here, I brought you an excellent book I just finished. If you’re sure you can handle the technology…”
After spending more time with this new UI, I think I’ve narrowed down why I find it so much worse and would prefer to rollback to the previous UI I enjoyed for years:
Each title uses up more vertical space on the screen than it used to, which means more scrolling is required to view the same number of titles. This extra vertical space adds no functionality at all; it is purely cosmetic, and doesn’t even look better to me, just pointlessly busier.
The “move to” commands over on the right are worse than they used to be. Before, the “Move to” box where you type a number was always visible, so you’d just click on it to give it the focus, type your number, and click go. (Of course most re-arranging was drag & drop, but still.) Now with the new interface you have to click a symbol to open the “Move to” box and then you have to click on the box itself and then you can start typing your number. They essentially changed a listbox into a combobox, and comboboxes suck balls in terms of usability: They’re clunky and inelegant. The old design was much more functionally elegant, so once again form over function.
The worst downgrade by far was the mouseover tooltip preview. In the old interface, when you mouse over a title or icon, a tooltip came up that showed you the movie title, the year/rating/length, a brief description, the genre, and the lead actors. Now the mouseover tooltip shows the title, year/rating/length and brief description, but they’ve removed the lead actors and genre. I base a non-trivial amount of my viewing choices on who the lead actors are, and it’s way more annoying to have to constantly open new tabs to answer “Wait, why did I add this to my queue? Who stars in it?”
I hate the new UI so much, and I’m rapidly approaching the age/mindset where “modern” = “sucks ass.”
Unless I’m watching a series – like how I wait for 3 or 4 Marvel movies to pile up then binge them all at once, in order – I browse my queue to find stuff I want to watch next. It goes like this:
Starting from the top, scroll down using mouse wheel to see if something catches my eye. (This is now more tedious because I have to scroll further to get anywhere.) If I see something I might want to watch in the near future, move it to the top of the list in order: The first I find goes to top, the next goes to 2, the next goes to 3, etc… (This is now more combersome because the new UI requires more clicks.) During this process, I’m constantly checking to see who stars in what to remind myself why I added that title to the queue in the first place. (WAY harder; now instead of mouseover tooltip I have to open a new friggin’ tab!)
Podcasts? Now how in tarrrnation am I s’posed to get those on the TV when the missus an’ me cain’t even figger out how to watch movies without disks? Ya dadgum whippersnappers…
