Make better use of the whole width of the screen on the website on a PC

[mrtickleuk]

I have a new laptop with a WQUXGA (3840 x 2400) display. I have a frustration which I wasn’t expecting

If I go to https://trakt.tv/people/jackie-chan?fade=watched&sort=released,asc
I see a grid of Jackie Chan’s movies. Lots of space is wasted on both the left and the right, and I understand that it’s the “style” and some whitespace is desirable, but my view is that this is too much and/or it’s not being done correctly. It’s far too much scrolling to see them all.

I thought “that’s ok, I’ll just zoom out”, using Chrome’s page zoom (ctrl and “-”). When I’ve done this on other websites, the same screen area is used, and more fits in that area. This doesn’t happen here - it’s quite mad!

I wouldn’t upload full 4k images here, but I can scale the images to illustrate the problem.

This is 100% size, with what I view as “wasted space” marked in a blocks of ORANGE.
[see below]
Next, this is what I see at 67% zoom. Instead of using the space well, even LESS of the width is used!
[see below]
Next, this is what I see at 25% zoom. Even worse:
[see below]

OK - new users can only upload one image - so I’ll combine them

On a modern site I really don’t think it’s good to have a fixed-width central section like this, it would be better to make some use of the extra screen space. I’m not say fill the whole 100% of the width, I understand the desire to have some whitespace, but not this much. The mentality of fixing the number of movies per row to a hard limit of only 5 or 6 on each row is a limitation with which I don’t agree. I’ve got the space, please use it!

All I wanted to do was see as many of Jackie’s movies on one screen as possible, with the ones I’ve seen faded, to get a rough visual indication of how much I’ve seen and if there are whole years I’m missing - something not possible to do from the simple “percent seen” at the top.

Anyway - hope this all makes sense!

[justin (Justin Nemeth)]

It’s a good idea, but not quite as simple as it sounds. The Trakt website is quite dynamic and has 3 different desktop sizes and a mobile view. We build on a grid based template and I’ll add a note to look into a wider container. This will unfortunately be low priority right now though.

[mrtickleuk]

Many thanks for responding so quickly.
If it’s on the list to do at so point - great.
I’d only ask that whatever width is selected isn’t just a new wider width which is fixed again and has the same effect, but that it scales a bit better when you change the zoom level.

As you can see even from my top, 100%, screenshot, there’s an awful amount of wasted space left/right (IMHO). I don’t see why it couldn’t be 7 or 8 movies wide at 100%, for example.

Thanks again!

[Wolfsblvt]

The overall scaling on huge screen sizes is very inconsistent on this site, I think that’s the biggest issue.

I didn’t even know the page view you linked to, as I would just search for for the actor and then use this page. It does not allow sorting by released of course though…

Search results for Jackie Chan

Looks like this on my 3440x1440 monitor:

Lots of space used, looks great. When I resize it as a window the columns stay the same and the images get resized, until they are too small and it switches dynamically to 6 movies in a column.

Now the whole “Movie” page that is directly linked in the header is similarly awful for huge monitors as your example, just in a different way. It does scale to screen size, but does not switch to more columns. It stays at two for the topmost and all others four per row.
Looks like this:

Soo much space wasted with huge images, and when I open this page I can’t even see the titles from the second row without scrolling
Only when I resize the window to really small it switches to 2 and 3 displayed columns.

On both of those pages zoom factor does not change anything besides font size btw. So no use there. Which is caused by the fixed columns used by Trakt based on viewport size I’d guess.

I just got used to using most websites in a smaller windows anyway, browsing on a huge screen is really not working well on many pages, Trakt is no outliner here.

[mrtickleuk]

thanks Wolfsblvt.
I would not use that search that you did, as it always matches anything with a sniff of a hint of a relevance.
For example, in this case it matches a whopping 638 results! I get the same number as you when I try it.
That’s hundreds of false positives! More than half of them are wrong!

So, my habit is that I will avoid using that search page unless I’m desperate. Drilling down to “people”, “movies” etc does help a little bit, but it’s often a case of wading through a lot of false positive to find what I want, even if I know the exact title of something.

For instance, clicking “people” on the search for Jackie finds 96 results. Only one of the 96 is the text “Jackie Chan”. I’ve got no clue at all how the other 95 came to be included. With all his career he’s not even “good enough”, from the computer’s point of view to be the first match, he’s 3rd , even though his is the only actual match. I can’t follow that logic.

From his own page:

Jackie Chan

his actual numbers are: