Plex, of personal media server fame, is rolling out an all-new user interface preview to certain customers, and it brings with it a notable change: the return of the familiar left-justified navigation bar. The change comes after a major Plex experience redesign preview last year, which placed navigational items on a horizontal strip near the top of the screen. This change proved controversial with users who preferred the left-sided setup.
“We greatly appreciate that many of you, all across our community, have weighed in and kept providing feedback. We’ve been listening and today the release has some changes that are both new and familiar,” says Plex in a forum post.
This Plex interface reversal is taking place today specifically for preview users on Apple TV and Roku, as well as for Android TV users running the beta version of the software. There’s no word on when the new setup might hit general stability, or when it’ll roll out more broadly to all Plex customers.
- notable shows
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Broadchurch, The Kids in the Hall, The Fall
- notable movies
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Warrior, A Walk to Remember, Heat, Halloween
- Premium Subscription
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No
- Originals
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No
- Live TV
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250+ channels
Plex offers a customizable streaming service for your own media library, making your favorite content accessible on-the-go worldwide.
Plex’s new interface comes with some other benefits
Quality-of-life improvements aplenty
In addition to the return of a vertical (and collapsible) navigation pane, Plex is also making a few other changes to its user interface in this same update. Notably, the company is elevating favorite libraries to be a top-level source, it’s adding in the ability to switch between pages within a source with less navigational work required, and it’s squashing some disparate bugs throughout the system.
What Plex isn’t doing is axing its redesigned user interface entirely. Aside from restoring the left-handed TV menu design, it’s clear that the company is working to optimize its new design rather than abandoning it in its entirety. The new Plex experience for big-screen TV platforms is still actively being tested in preview and beta channels, and it will presumably hit the mainstream sometime in the near future.
I’m happy to see Plex taking user feedback into account when crafting its new UI experience, rather than forcing users to adapt to a change for the sake of change. The collapsible, left-handed navigational pane is a Plex staple, and it has worked its way into many users’ muscle memory over the years.
If you’d like to access Plex Preview Builds across Apple TV, Roku, and Android TV, you can do so by following this link. Note that the software is still in testing, and so you may encounter some bugs or other oddities if you choose to run it on any of your devices.
