Apart from the launch of V3 being way too early given the lack of feature parity, I wonder from a pure UX perspective how things could have turned out this way, and why it seemed necessary to mess with what was more than fine?
The V2 trakt web experience has, in all honesty, always been one of my go-to examples for good web app UX. And there are extremely few web apps that I would consider to have good UX.
Thereās enough information density in V2 while still being image-rich and visually pleasing. The new UI is just blank. All the important navigation elements are sprinkled seemingly randomly around the page, not a single positioning or spacing seems to line up with anything else. Most stuff is hidden behind extra clicks for no reason, and the icon-only priority is very ambiguous. In V2, it always seemed intuitively clear where to click to get something done. In V3, everything is guesswork. Is it maybe just hidden? Is it missing entirely? Or am I misinterpreting one of the icons?
Elements are logically placed in V2, with clear separations between different sections. In V3, everything is thrown onto a single pile with little rhyme or reason, and no way to visually distinguish one thing from the other.
V2 had awesome information visualisation. The progress bars beneath shows were the most helpful thing ever for a site like this. Season overviews, watch and comment history, genre and ratings overviews, everything was easily available and immediately understandable. V3 seems to have just deleted everything? I can still see a checkmark on what I marked as watched, and⦠thatās pretty much it. I can find the number of remaining episodes, if I know where to look. But my actual progress? No idea. What made me choose Trakt over any of the alternatives were the massive amounts of information, stats, sorting and filtering options. Most of that is gone now.
And the lists⦠where is my watch history? I see 2 movies when I open the page. If I scroll to the footer, then back up, then to the footer again, then back up again, it loads 2 more movies. Another footer-top-footer-top-footer and I see 2 more movies. At some point, the infinite scroll recovers and starts working somewhat (although it ends after ~4 months?), but⦠itās infinite scroll.
UX experts have been warning for more than a decade now that infinite scroll is almost always a terrible idea. It is always worse than clear pagination, like V2 had, for uncountable reasons. Iām flabbergasted that a website still chooses to implement infinite scroll these days.
I donāt enjoy being too negative, but the functionality of the site is just gone in V3. 99% is missing. Which would be one thing if it was a super visually pleasing upgrade, but the new look is an inconsistent hodgepodge of spacings and icons and rounded corners and scrollbars, nothing lines up, nothing matches anything else. If I saw the two sites next to each other and didnāt know any better, I wouldāve thought V2 was the upgrade to V3. Iām not exaggerating when I say that in 30 years of using the web, as far as UX and UI design go, Trakt V2 is one of my best-rated experiences ever, and Trakt V3 one of my worst-rated ever¹. Something went wrong guys!
I really hope youāll keep V2 around, otherwise itāll also be the end of my VIP subscription, because my flows simply donāt work anymore.
¹ Another one that ranks close to the bottom, thematically related, was the MobyGames redesign while they were owned by Gamefly. But even that wasnāt as bad, because it just broke the UI, without acutally removing any functionality (as far as I remember). My biggest hope is that what happened with MobyGames will also happen with Trakt: the community outrage about the redesigned site was so universal, that they reversed course, emergency-restored the old site, and rededicated their efforts to improving the older, better site, which worked and which users liked.