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Comment by toxican | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. I love what Plex allows me to do it, but the UI has taken a nose dive in recent months. Or at least the Roku app, which looks identical to this, has.

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Though for all their steps backwards, this is a big step in the right direction. According to them, they can now develop and improve upon a sole app for all devices. With this move, we'll finally start seeing more features and refinement. See -> "massively improved efficiency when it comes to adding features and fixing bugs"

We won't.

Just now i browsed through a thread where a user was complaining about about the UI being atrociously lacking of options and how it slows down people.

A plex employee said:

  > I personally think 'just add an option/setting' is not the ideal
  > solution. Death by 1000 cuts, and all. I can see the argument for one
  > setting, but they add up. And then it's combinatorial attack. 'Oh, did
  > you toggle switch X and Y?' 'No?' 'Oh'. Not where we are now, but I
  > don't want to end up there, so am (probably overly so, as my coworkers
  > can attest) aggressive in avoiding explicit settings

Consumer software options must be added carefully and parsimoniously to avoid the "death" envisioned by the employee. Apps like this should just do the right thing, and PMs should spend some time figuring out what that is. If you want to spend hours tweaking something then get a bicycle or something. Once the interface is complicated at all, it basically just lies to 90% of users. (cf. Facebook and their ever-changing privacy options)

There's a bit of context that goes along with this, but in short the above quote is ridiculous, because they're throwing up a slippery slope argument in response to the smallest and most reasonable request, in a situation where there is no "right thing", since the software serves different people in different ways and making one way that serves all equally well is impossible, and hard-coding one locks out one user base. This is made worse by them locking out previous users with their changes by disabling usage patterns they previously provided.

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