Short description of the issue
- The new UI focuses more on being closer to likes of imdb/tmdb (showing media info) than prioritising tracking, watch history, and community.
Detailed description with additional context about the workflow
On trakt’s about page ( Trakt Web: About ), trakt states that
Trakt is a platform that … automatically tracks what you’re watching across all your devices and apps — giving you a single place to see your entire watch history, discover what’s next, and connect with a community of millions of movie and TV lovers around the world.
i.e. Trakt’s primary objective is to focus on tracking, keeping watch history, suggesting what’s next, offer tools for building community around shared interests in movies & TV; With such statement it implied that these functionalities will-be prioritized wherever relevant.
Let’s look at the current “new” android experience
Heartbreak High is a show that has three seasons in total. I’ve watched first two seasons. So, I expect Trakt to convey this information about this show to me with the most priority, especially when I’m at the home screen of this show’s entry.
- But as you’ll look at the first screenshot, almost 50% of screen is occupied by the cover image.
- Why do we need such a big cover image? What’s your main purpose?
- Then there are ratings
- Irrelevant to my main needs but okay Helpful info
- Name of the show in a large font
- We’ve already lost more than 50% precious screen real estate, but Helpful info
- Creator
- cool, thanks?
- ‘Start’ year of the show, total episodes, Age label, Genre
- Helpful info
- Status of the show
- Helpful info
- Colored Box button with double ticks (no indication of what it means or what pressing it will do), button to bookmark, trailer button, and more options button
- What’s missing here is the ‘tracking’ detail of my watch progress, my last watched episode, my next episode to watch (aired or unaired, and date)
- User rating
- Helpful
So, the user has opened the show’s page but still doesn’t know his watch progress, his watch history, and what episode to watch next or if it has aired or not and the double-ticked button doesn’t help.
So the user scrolls, here are the next sections as you can see above in screenshots:
- Show summary
- VIP ad (for free tier accounts)
- Where to watch
- User still doesn’t know what episode to watch next anyways
- Sentiment (summarized likes and dislikes based on reviews)
- Reviews of Users
- Cast
- Seasons & their respective episodes
- Whilst each season and their episode listing contain single and double ticks to signify if watched or not, it still doesn’t tell user their last watched and next to watch episode unless the user manually checks the all the ticks corresponding to each episode.
Here’s how long one has to scroll for semblance of watch history with the burden of manually checking each tick to decipher the progress but no airing date. If you scroll further
- Extras
- Related Shows
- Popular Lists
- History
- Actual watch history is here!
- Details
So, to get to the actual watch history of this show, you have to get to the second last section. What was the purpose of this website in the About Section again?
The Desktop website suffers from the similar affliction
And here’s how it different from the android experience whilst still failing at Trakt’s main goals
- With the same level of progress as android, the main button has off-white background with a single tick icon
- It lists cast before “Reviews”
- Extras Section is listed before Seasons/Episodes
- Currently unselected seasons are faded on website in comparison to being desaturated on android
- the tick for seasons is behind the three-dot menu
- It has a “Trivia” section which isnt present on its android counterpart
- No “History” section
- so no actual watch history info available on the page at all
- No details section
So somehow the desktop counterpart has even less important info: No watch progress, no watch history, no next watch, no dates.
This new redesign, in essence, seems as if it has goals different to statement in Trakt’s About page.
I’ve already talked about how the Ratings system has been downgraded and how there is this Inconsistency of Ticks and Colors in buttons across platforms as sign of degradation of its functionality for users as further examples.
Overall, this new redesign fails at Trakt’s intended priorities and thus doesn’t align with its stated features resulting in significantly worse user experience.