I was having a read of the latest monthly update newsletter and I see that V3 is now the default for everyone.
It has been on my backlog for a while to do a roundup post of various things that seem like sharp edges that would be nice to touch up.
I’m not going to comment on V3 itself very much given I understand the technical reasons for V2 needing to be deprecated and it’s here to stay so I’ll just comment on things as they appear.
Of course, design is subjective so feel free to pick and choose whatever.
There was also a thread at one point back when passwordless signins were the only option and I’m glad user/pass came back because weirdly I found myself running into that friction a fair bit so I’m hopeful that better things are possible.
Anyway, in no particular order and of varying sizes:
When clicking the hamburger menu on various items, the whitespace above “Track” is a little offputting. Note that the track button for an unwatched item is grey. This contradicts the track button on other pages which we’ll come to later.
Display filters in the filter sidebar start in a center state. Clicking these three-option sliders then turns them into binary sliders where they can only be on or off, yet both on and off are considered filter states with no way to transition back to the third unapplied state. The only way to do this is to click reset filters.
Mousing over a daily streak item and them mousing up to the previous week causes the cursor to intersect with the active tooltip instead of the tooltip dismissing and then rendering the tooltip for the previous week
There seems to be no obvious way to know what each icon actually represents. Attempting to hover over an icon for an extended period of time does not produce a tooltip so there is no obvious way for the user to discover what an action does without clicking that action.
Progress filters only appear to apply client side instead of eg; appending a filter status as a URL query parameter meaning it is not possible to say; bookmark the in-progress set of progress items.
A couple things here:
- “Manage lists” does not immediately imply “This is a place where you can add this show to lists that are not your watch list”. It instead makes it sound like you might go there to make a new list.
- Similarly, I would expect clicking the bookmark icon to ask which list you would like to add an item to but instead the user automatically adds an item to their watch list.
- Many destructive actions here such as drop show, report and deleting from history present a dialog warning, training the user to expect some amount of safety. Paradoxically, clicking “Set as cover image” immediately replaces the user’s cover image. They may be clicking the button to learn more about what side effects it may have (or ie; a reminder of what the cover refers to exactly being the user’s profile cover)
- Conceptually I understand why clicking the play button might full screen play a trailer for a show but it would be nice to just be a normal link so the user could decide whether they want to open a trailer in a new tab. A screen hijack with no foreshadowing seems a little excessive
The watched item badges are black while the single watched item button is purple. For quite some time, I mistaken thought purple was a call to action to mark something as watched, not unlike using green for a button that performs a successful action. It turns out that the button reflects a past state, not a state you would like to transition to.
Having a left aligned title with a center aligned grid under Search feels a little wonky
If you don’t have any Liked lists or Collaborations, the empty state for this is non-obvious. At first I thought the results were taking some time to load or that a Javascript exception had occurred that halted rendering.
Calendar has a method for traversing between weeks while History does not
When editing a list, there is a slider with three states. I can’t immediately think of a state beyond either public or private? Having it initialise in the center is confusing.
The track button for releases starts as a purple hollow button with highlighting translating to a black button. This seems to be the reverse of the larger track button on the detail page which starts black and hollow, transitioning to purple and filled on hover.