INTRODUCING: Updated IMDb.com Title page experience

@Col_Needham 😃

A redesign at IMDb always starts with the customer
-- both reactive feedback gathered from existing customers of the current site
and proactive outreach with research panels of customers and non-customers alike.
We consider what is working for them in the design and what is not.

WE do not know who these existing customers are...

May be all new to IMDb and did not see the better Old views

'customers' on sprinklr do not like these changes
Others do not know where to offer comments
Add a  "Like: YES | NO" vote on the pages ? ?
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https://community-imdb.sprinklr.com/conversations/imdbcom/introducing-updated-imdbcom-title-page-experience/60a40631c1307254c6cc1b0d?commentId=60a748ff8c74ef317253ce0e&replyId=60a7df338c74ef317253d8c5

  
https://community-imdb.sprinklr.com/conversations/imdbcom/introducing-updated-imdbcom-title-page-experience/60a40631c1307254c6cc1b0d?commentId=60a748ff8c74ef317253ce0e&replyId=60a94ce1fad48e7959854dbe

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INTRODUCING: Updated IMDb.com Title page experience

807 views | 34 Comments | 42 Followers

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ACT_1 Member since Sun Apr 30 2000

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Well, it does appear as though the "big tech" companies do have ways to derive subconscious feedback from people who visit their platforms. The rest is statistical analysis and psychology.

@Col_Needham So what you are saying (and correct me if I'm wrong), Is you'll take it and you'll like it? 

Feedback is precious, when users go silent is when you should worry.

Don't make the mistake of thinking you are "too big to fail" or the only available resource.

"The new technology is significantly easier to build upon, it is more engaging, and it is also responsive so we no longer need to build every feature twice (once for desktop web and once for mobile web)."

This is straight up a bullshit excuse, you can (and should) change/update the tech but you can keep the design/layout  which is loved by the community!

The mobile world is great on the go, but there is an APP for that!

For home media there is no substitute for huge beautiful screen, such a screen requires a proper layout to take advantage of! You know, like the layout you had a few days ago...

Best regards

@Col_Needham

I actively avoid looking up anything on IMDb on my phone because I find the interface so incredibly clunky and difficult to navigate.

Using my PC has been so much easier in the past that I have always been perfectly happy to remain patient enough to look up things when I get home instead of banging my head against the wall trying to find things on Android.

Thankfully I have a large screen to work with at home, but even still I find this new page to be a significant downgrade in quality for my IMDb experience. 

You have said redesign at IMDB starts with the customer but the customers are telling you in essentially resounding consistency this is terrible. 

It is actively ugly to look at. It looks like the giant font my aging parents have on their phones because their eyesight isn't what it used to be.

@Col_Needham but my biggest question is why should anyone continue updating IMDB pages, watching every single closing credits and adding those names with accuracy and billing order - something we do for free and just to have the information correct - if the result on the page is a messy two-column blob of bold, giant font names? There's no point. It looks like a page with no actual ordering and therefore updating it is a waste of time

@Col_Needham 

Let me respectfully take issue with a few things you've said here.

1. "A redesign at IMDb always starts with the customer..."

While you say this, I submit that it's more corporate-speak than truth. While you may have gathered feedback and gathered some input, the fact remains that the major changes have made the page slower to load (mostly thanks to the multiple API calls to ad servers and external 3rd party content [a quick analysis of an example title showed API calls to taboola, amazon adsystem, scorecardresearch, cloudfront, plus multiple other script calls to image servers and other things]), with less viewable information and a lot more scrolling to get to details about each movie.

2. "The new technology is significantly easier to build upon...and it is also responsive so we no longer need to build every feature twice (once for desktop web and once for mobile web)."

This is a good thing, but making the change to HTML5 (which is what I assume you are now using, since it can handle the dynamics of both web and mobile displays) doesn't have anything to do with the design of the page. I don't think most of us that are pushing back against this change are at all troubled by you upgrading the backend, our issues are with the redesign, specifically around the usability. 

3. "it is more engaging"

I'm not sure how you are measuring engagement, but I can tell you that the main things I do on the site now require additional steps (either extra mouse clicks, more scrolling, or new scripts and technology). Here are a few examples of that: a) When I acquire a new digital movie, I add it to a personally created list - with the old design I simply had to hover the mouse over the watchlist plus sign and a dropdown list of my lists would appear, and one click added the movie to the list. Now, I have to click on an arrow button next to the add to watchlist button, and wait for a popup to come up with my lists, then click on the list name to add the movie to the list; b) on the old page, I could see the entire movie info header, the synopsis, movie photos, and at least some of the list of actors without having to scroll at all. With 3 turns of my scroll mouse wheel (on average), I was at the bottom of the page. Now, The movie header takes up 3/4s of the screen, and without adding ANY additional information, it now take 5 turns of the scroll mouse wheel just to get past the top cast list (with the GIANT bubble pictures of each person), and an average of 8 scrolls to get to the bottom of the page; c)With the old page, I could capture the small movie poster image that was on the main movie page by right-clicking and saving the image [I use them so that I can view the posters when looking through the movies I own when browsing for something to watch]. That is not possible with the new page, it is a script, and the small sized image is gone. There is a thumbnail sized poster image on the reference view, but it's much smaller than the one from the old page. That is just a few examples, I have several more.

3. "We accept that change is hard to handle...All we ask is that you give yourself time to get used to the new interface..."

Change is good, but I think you need to be honest here - these changes aren't functionality improvements, because they have actually degraded the experience for many of us. The main purpose of the design changes appears to be about adding more ad revenue, not improving the user experience. The information on the page didn't change. The ad inserts will still be blocked by a good ad-blocker (which is absolutely necessary thanks to redesigns like this that seem to insert an endless stream of ads. I absolutely respect your need to monitize the site, but not at the expense of functionality, which this redesign appears to do). 

You already offer a more compact view with your "reference view" option - It wouldn't be difficult to either add an additional option to have the information display like the previous version, or just modify the "reference view" to be the old version. That would solve the issues we are experiencing.    

If I could like this 10 times I would.

@Col_Needham In other words, you are "Integrating" the PC and Mobile in FAVOR of the ridiculous MOBILE app style as opposed to the other way around. It's atrocious. And I think you'll find more people will leave rather than "get use to it:. I know I will. 

@Col_Needham 

"This change is part of on-going work to improve IMDb both in the front-end user interface and on the back-end technology platform."

You may be improving the back-end technology (or not), but you certainly aren't improving the user experience. 

"it is more engaging"

In whose opinion? Certainly not most of the people commenting here.

"We accept that change is hard to handle...All we ask is that you give yourself time to get used to the new interface..."

And all the vast majority of your users ask is that you don't try to fix what isn't broken. Why force change at all when obviously hardly anyone wants it? 

Possibly it is more engaging according to formulaic statistical analysis of "biometric" data. I don't know. Nowadays, websites tend to track every mouse click and every key press, possibly every movement of the cursor. Maybe companies exploit the knowledge similar to the knowledge that can be gained by watching Brain Games.

What on earth does fingerprint scans have to do with anything here?

Right, well, it is not the literal biometric data, but more like behavioral data.

@Col_Needham This new design is objectively worse. All you've accomplished is making it more difficult to find information. IMDB is now useless. I won't grow accustomed to this garbage because I'm never using IMDB again because you broke it.

@samofnine  You can check-in to a title directly by adding the title to your check-ins list.  To do this, click the down arrow on the right of the "Add to Watchlist" button and then click the symbol to the left of your "Check-ins" list in the menu:

We will update the help to cover this once the new design has been 100% launched. 

We will check with the product team on returning the localised plot outlines.

@Col_Needham This redesign sucks.

@samofnine - To update you, localized plot outlines are now viewable on the site!  For more information and details on how to adjust your Content Settings see our recent Non-English Plot Outlines Announcement.

Cheers!

Should a corporation impose obligations upon itself? Of course, sometimes it should and does, but not all the time. The way IMDb does this typically involves gathering feedback from a small percentage of its customer base, or perhaps even a fixed number across time, and presumably the participants come from diverse backgrounds, but this is hard to know for sure. I was only ever offered to participate in one survey, and it was related to IMDbPro, back when I was a beneficiary of the award for the Top 250 Contributors (prior to the Top 300 Contributors system). As a contributor, I've pleaded that advance notice be provided about certain upgrades, for the sake of the orderliness of that data and content presentation, as sometimes things are overlooked, resulting in broken aspects of revamped product. Anyway, I do agree that the company ought to make it a habit of gathering as much feedback from as many customers as possible before even beginning the implementation of a new feature that customers have not even requested.

This is true for now, but I am pretty sure they are working on altering some of the other modules to match this new format :(.

I disagree with the premise of firing people willy nilly, that is a horrible proposition, but certainly some higher ups should be scrutinized for greenlighting/engineering such a drastic detrimental change to the website.

An extension or mod add for faithful users would be a wonderful fix for all of us who want a return to the nice clean format of the old page.

Yes, it's hard to find a new job, I don't want people fired. Besides, they probably had bosses telling them what to do. It is very sad to think they did show it to some test users, who probably shared their disgust for the new design and were ignored. 

They apparently 'did'? give us options back in December, but I don't remember being asked to research or vote on anything.  I have been a member for 6 years and have been using this service for probably 15+ years.

actually I tried to browse through that new layout when it was first introduced as an option to check out.
I left some feedback about how bad is the design and asking not to make it mandatory.
of course, not a single flying fock was given.

The previous design was almost perfect.