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3.2.26.0 UI Changes... Very disappointed!


Sketchy

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Sketchy

I've been using Emby for about a year or two to manage my media and up until now I've only ever posted on these forums when I needed tech support of some kind, but with the 3.2.26.0 update that I woke up to today I have to say I am really disappointed with the UI changes you guys made. There are a bajillion different ways to access Emby but I *believe* its the Web App I'm referring to here since I haven't installed emby theater or anything like that and I and my friends access Emby through our browsers.

 

Here's my beefs with this update. I assume (and I could be wrong) that most people using Emby via the Web App are controlling the UI using a Mouse and or Keyboard? If that's the case then I really don't get some of the recent changes to the UI.

 

For the Home Page of Emby

You guys switched it so that the "Next Up", "Latest TV", "Latest Movies" etc are all on individual continuous lines. In other words, if you previously had a bunch of items for each of these sections (think 10-15 or something) they would reach the end of the screen and wrap to a new line. NOW they are EACH on continuous lines and each SECTION requires HORIZONTAL SCROLLING. Previously I could have viewed all of the content on the home page at a glance by scrolling my mouse wheel down just a few clicks. Now I have to go to each individual section and either tilt my mouse wheel over to the side or move my cursor over to the small icon at the end of the list and click it a few times. For every section! This is so counter intuitive and annoying. It seems like a small thing but it is not.

 

For the Season View of a TV Show

Previously you could see I believe, 8 columns of episodes in 1 row and I think 3 or 4 rows, (so 24 - 32 Episodes) all at a glance on the season view of a TV show. For whatever reason, you guys decided to enlarge the thumbnails and put the episode descriptions on the page, and now you can only see ~3 episodes on the page and a ton of vertical scrolling is required for shows with lots of episodes. To me, the season view now looks more like what I think the actual episode view SHOULD look like. Being able to view a lot of episodes at a glance was a good thing. (some of my animated shows have 60+ episodes in a season!). Furthermore, you can't even click the thumb nails and you do not get a UI on hover so you can't do things like mark the episode as watched using the thumbnail so you now have to go into the episode view. The only way to even get to the episode view from here is to click the "i" at the right side of the screen which I didn't find very intuitive either. Since I tend to cast everything to MPC-BE using MPC Remote I have to manually mark things as watched and my preferred method of hovering over the thumbnail on the season view no longer works. Also, now the season view, imo, is mostly just wasted background space... :( Also, the ability to see LOTS of thumbnails at a glance, has on several occasions, made it obvious to me that a particular show (mostly Anime) had scrapped its info incorrectly or that I had some sort of issue with the metadata for a particular show.

 

For the Episode View of a TV Show

Personally I never liked or understood why you guys recently added the horizontal scrolling of additional episodes (ie, "More From Season <x>") underneath the info for the currently selected episode. I would have thought simply showing the Previous episode and at most 1 or 2 of the Next Episodes would have made more sense. If I wanted to select an episode 15 episodes down the list, doing so from the Season View would have made more sense to me. Not a huge deal either way though, as generally I would click on an episode form the Home screen, which would take me to the Episode View, and from there I would click on the Season link and generally select stuff from there. Previously, I always used the Season View to mark individual episodes as watched because as stated earlier I cast to MPC and I just found this to be more convenient for me.

 

These pages were basically all changed in such a way that there is now LESS information available at a glance and MORE work is required to access the information that was previously viewable at a glance. I liked a lot of your previous update changes such as giving individual sections for all the new content on the home page, and being able to select the landing page when going to your Movies and TV etc links but this update and its UI changes really, REALLY bummed me out. 

 

Is there a way to revert or roll back to a previous version of Emby? While I generally like all the updates, this particular one really rubbed me the wrong way and makes me want to just revert to my previous version and turn off auto updates... :/ I think horizontal scrolling, for the most part, is just an overall bad idea for people controlling the UI with a mouse and the wasted space and lack of a pop up UI on hover on the Season thumbnails has basically made it so that I have issues with the Home Page, the Season View AND the Episode View when dealing with TV shows via Emby. Movies are, for the most part, totally fine. I haven't always agreed with some of the UI choices you guys have made in the past but none of it bothered me enough to get me to come to the forums to post about it but man this update to the UI disappointed me. :(

 

PS: You can't search for version numbers on the forums so I couldn't search for 3.2.26.0 to see if/where people were posting their issues about it so I dunno if there was an existing thread somewhere that I could have voiced these opinions. Sorry for coming here basically just to whine but again... so bummed out with these changes. I really liked it how it was.

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These changes were very well received by the test group, but as always if enough people want something different than settings are always possible. Thanks for the feedback.

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d00zah

@@Sketchy, thanks for the heads-up. I'm inclined to agree with a great deal of your assessment.

 

IF you'd like to revert to the last server version, you can:

 

- Disable automatic updates & stop the server.

- Open the server installation folder & note 2 folders... 'System' & 'System.old'. 'System.old' is the prior version.

- Rename 'System' to 'System.3.2.26.0' & rename 'System.old' to 'System'

- Restart the server.

 

Backing up the 'System' folder really ought to be done prior to an update & IF the update involves database changes, you should also save a copy of the 'data' folder.

 

Just be aware that future problem reports will be met with the suggestion to 'update to the current server'.

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Angelblue05

I personally feel the same way about the horizontal scrolling on the webclient home screen.

 

I love it in the ios app with a touch screen, it feels sleek, the animation is great. But in the webclient, it feels clunky.

 

The dark sections with arrows look out of style. The area for clicking should be made larger, rather than just the arrow. There is no "hold down" continuous scroll, which generates a lot of click to get through the horizontal list. The click scroll animation feels laggy. Compared to the rest of the interface, it sticks out like a sore thumb. I preferred the previous layout for the webclient. Horizontal scrolling is definitely not made for the web/mouse experience, if to move one item left or right requires a click. That's a lot of clicking.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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PenkethBoy

I assume you have spotted that if you click the arrow beside the "library name" on the home screen it takes you to a more conventional list - although that also does have issues as it does not always show the same list as the horizontal scroll - sometimes less sometime more

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What's interesting is that previously an effort was made to tweak the number of items such that there would always be one row. So another way of looking at this is that you've actually been given more items to see than you had before.

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arrbee99

I personally feel the same way about the horizontal scrolling on the webclient home screen.

 

I love it in the ios app with a touch screen, it feels sleek, the animation is great. But in the webclient, it feels clunky.

 

The dark sections with arrows look out of style. The area for clicking should be made larger, rather than just the arrow. There is no "hold down" continuous scroll, which generates a lot of click to get through the horizontal list. The click scroll animation feels laggy. Compared to the rest of the interface, it sticks out like a sore thumb. I preferred the previous layout for the webclient. Horizontal scrolling is definitely not made for the web/mouse experience, if to move one item left or right requires a click. That's a lot of clicking.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

I don't have a problem with horizontal scrolling as such, but do agree it would be nicer if it would glide or flow instead of jump, and also had a continuous scroll

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Angelblue05

You are right, I just restarted my server and it's no longer laggy (felt there was a delay between clicking and displaying the new card).

 

But the rest still applies. It needs a glide animation, instead of a click action. I would then have no issue with the horizontal scrolling.

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d00zah

 Agree with the comments about the Home page horizontal scrolling .. that's where I differed with the OP.

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Angelblue05

For the episode listing, I do miss a quick way to mark as watched/unwatched. But also miss the wall of artwork; I really don't care about metadata displayed except for the episode number and title. In general, it takes longer to get around than before. There is two general layouts: Artwork (as it was before, no horizontal scrolling), and detailed (as it is now, more netflix-like). It's hard to hit a balance between the two, but right now, it's just too many clicks and scrolls.

 

Again, I love the same detailed layout in the ios app, I don't want it to change. I just don't like it in the webclient, where speed to get around is expected with minimal actions with a mouse.

Edited by Angelblue05
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pir8radio

If you have a mouse wheel with a left and right scroll it works with each row.   so instead of using the mouse wheel rolling it up and down you get to the row you want and click the mouse wheel right to scroll over...   

 

I didn't care much for this at first, but after using its kind of growing on me.

 

I agree with post #7 a smoother scroll would be cool.   much like holding the mouse wheel right.

I don't have a problem with horizontal scrolling as such, but do agree it would be nicer if it would glide or flow instead of jump, and also had a continuous scroll

 
Edited by pir8radio
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freezy

Can't you just add a watched button to the episode list view? This would be my main complaint. I often watch episodes through another player and just want to mark episodes as watched, which has become very cumbersome now. In fact, I tried to do it yesterday I gave up frustrated. Only now I'm reading about the "i" button opening the episode view - this for me is unexpected because the "i" usually signifies info about the UI itself, not the content, and from this kind of icon I would expect a popup, definitely not page navigation. Why not just link it through the episode title? I remember clicking on it, hoping it worked and you just forgot to put the right hover CSS (it's a pattern Emby already uses, show and season titles, they are clickable and navigate to the corresponding page).

 

So in my opinion, it would be much better to:

 

  1. Replace the "i" icon with the watched icon (and feature, obviously)
  2. Link episode details through the title of the episode (or even the whole info block)

Let me know if you prefer a new thread or GitHub issue about this. Otherwise I like the changes!

Edited by freezy
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freezy

Still looking at the episode listing, what about the "favorite" button? Why would you prefer to put the favorite button over the watched button? I mean, by definition, people watch more episodes than they favorite, right? So a watched button would be much more used than the favorite button. And you always want to make the most used feature accessible the easiest.

 

If you don't agree with the "i" point I made above, please consider replacing the favorite button with the watched button in the episode listing. Just adding a fourth button would probably be okay as well, since there is plenty of space available.

Edited by freezy
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PenkethBoy

Agree the "i" icon is a bit odd - as when i first noticed it on the beta server as couple of weeks ago was a bit surprised when it went to the "detail" screen of the episode

 

Yes clicking on the title and/or the episode image to migrate to the episode detail screen would be more intuitive.

 

Also as an aside the episode detail screen has the ugly horizontal scroll bar for showing other episodes - might be better with the <> arrows like the home screen

 

Overall i like the new Season episode layout as its cleaner - although it does waste a lot of window space - maybe a double column format would be better  :P or triple if the screen is wide enough

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freezy

Yes clicking on the title and/or the episode image to migrate to the episode detail screen would be more intuitive.

 

Yes, linked title and thumb would be even better. You can do it like you do it in the movie list: play button on the bottom right of the thumb. Then, as a bonus, you not only increase usability but also coherence across the different lists.

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CBers

I think I would prefer to see a page of content as you do in the TV Shows (/web/tv.html) and Movies (/web/movies.html) pages.

 

Scrolling left-to-right just doesn't seem right on a PC.

 

I know left-to-right scrolling is in the ATV app, which I use 99% of the time, but that is via remote control, not a keyboard or mouse.

 

I would like to see scrolling top-to-bottom become the norm, like I believe it used to be

 

Just my thoughts :)

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CBers

Looking at it again, there are different views for different levels.

 

TV and Movies are poster view, Season are vertical and episodes are horizontal.

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lexisdude

Each level of the UI should be configurable to the tastes of the home user. This use to be the standards goal across all media server platforms - cant please everyone; but surely can loosen the noose with some elements being options instead of having no other options but default. But thats my $.02

Edited by lexisdude
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Sketchy

For the season view I think that the thumbnail and episode title should be clickable to bring you to the episode view, but also, I think that hovering over the thumbnail should bring the ui popup like it used to (like how it works with movies) so that you can mark episodes as watched/favorite/etc that way. Also since there is a lot of what i'd consider to be wasted space with the season view, it would be good if perhaps there were 2 episodes per row. This would at least display 6 episodes on a page which while a far cry from the previous 24 it used to show, would still be a nice improvement from the 3 per page that it current displays on a 1920x1080 display.

 

For the episode view, as someone above stated, if its going to continue to have horizontal scrolling, it should probably be adjusted so that it loses the scroll bar and gains the side arrows so that the look of the horizontal scrolling is at least standardized. Having it done one way on the home page and another on the episode view is a bit weird.

 

For both those pages and basically all sections with horizontal scrolling, it would also be nice if perhaps you could "grab" the part that has horizontal scrolling by holding down the left mouse and "dragging" that section left or right with the mouse.

 

The "Ends at" information shown on both the season and episode views... It'll show an episode as airing at lets say 9:00 pm, and the "Ends at" info will basically just say some weird time like 6:17am for basically every episode in the season. This is even for currently airing shows, not just old shows. Either I misunderstand what "Ends at" is even trying to tell me, or else the information is just wrong and basically pointless ? (especially for non live tv)

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Ends at has been a fan favorite and requested by many users over the years.

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shorty1483

The "Ends at" information shown on both the season and episode views... It'll show an episode as airing at lets say 9:00 pm, and the "Ends at" info will basically just say some weird time like 6:17am for basically every episode in the season. This is even for currently airing shows, not just old shows. Either I misunderstand what "Ends at" is even trying to tell me, or else the information is just wrong and basically pointless ? (especially for non live tv)

 

The Ends at info shows at what time the video is finished if you begin to play it.

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Jdiesel

I would agree, it is very difficult to mark multiple individual episodes as watched now. You can easily mark an entire season as watched but must drill in to each episodes info screen to mark it as watched which is very time consuming when you have 15-20 episodes in a season to mark as watched. Before you could mark them all watched from season view.

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Dibbes

This may be thought too simplistic, but is there not a way to have both as a sort of theme?

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Jdiesel

597ba1b8d51d9_Untitled.pngI like the new look. My suggestion would be to include the "hover" buttons on the thumbs rather than the buttons to the left of the summary. Increase the size of the thumb and shift the summary text over. Other option could be to include a watched button with the others on the left. To me it makes sense to continue with the hover buttons as they are used everywhere else.

 

 

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I will probably just add the watched checkmark button to the right.

 

I'm not too crazy about relying on the hover menu as the primary means of performing a function. Not only does it depend on a mouse but it also depends on the user discovering that it's there.

 

So I think ultimately, for high resolution screens, the checkmark button will be added. On smaller screens we need to get marking favorite and toggling watch status into the 3-dot context menu.

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