Today (July 23, 2020) we have made an update to our primary contribution experience (accessible from the <Edit Page> button on all name, title and company pages) to make it work responsively based on your device type.
For contributors accessing our contribution interface from desktop, the experience is almost identical. To illustrate, below is a quick link to show the CX for editing all of the release dates for a movie, accessible via this link -> https://contribute.imdb.com/updates?update=tt0088763:release_dates.correct.all
This is what I see on my laptop:-

If you click on the same link from a mobile device, the layout of the UI will change based on your device type. Here is the same link as above, accessed from my iPhone:-

All of the underlying functionality is the same, we have just changed the layout to one that is more usable on a mobile device (you no longer have to scroll from left to right to see all of the fields in the table).
We have moved away from the traditional grid, and have laid out each item into it's own component (with hints above the fields to show the labels). In the example above, you can scroll down to see all the release dates for Back to the Future (1985).
The feature is enabled for every data type accessible from name, title and company pages. It is also enabled when adding a new title -> https://contribute.imdb.com/updates?update=title&ref_=gs_newtitle_ra
If you have any questions/feedback, please respond to this thread.
Cheers,
Rachel
Rachel, Employee
- 119 Posts
- 219 Reply Likes
Posted 4 days ago
- 2423 Posts
- 4754 Reply Likes

[ Device: Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ (plus) ]
- 11 Posts
- 19 Reply Likes
Rachel, Employee
- 119 Posts
- 219 Reply Likes
- 11 Posts
- 19 Reply Likes
This is a textbook example for pressing the rollback button and trying again next week.
Adrian, Champion
- 1680 Posts
- 2053 Reply Likes
- 11 Posts
- 19 Reply Likes
Adrian, Champion
- 1680 Posts
- 2053 Reply Likes
- 207 Posts
- 453 Reply Likes
- 11 Posts
- 19 Reply Likes
For me, it would be "actor credit change for photo", which now works as an addition + delete, but of course the delete gets denied so you end up with 2 faces and 3 names.
- 207 Posts
- 454 Reply Likes
1. Please consult with contributors before making changes that affect our contribution tools.
2. Please stop vandalizing the desktop site for the sake of mobile users.
Peter, Champion
- 8169 Posts
- 10639 Reply Likes
Not many top contributors are 'Champions', so I'm not sure that is the best approach. I assumed that Adrian, gromit82, GMJ, ljdoncel, bderoes etc. were able to see the previous thread, but I am posting this in case they were not able to see it and should have been.
Adrian, Champion
- 1680 Posts
- 2053 Reply Likes
Peter, Champion
- 8169 Posts
- 10639 Reply Likes
bderoes, Champion
- 2343 Posts
- 3900 Reply Likes
- 207 Posts
- 454 Reply Likes
Adrian, Champion
- 1680 Posts
- 2053 Reply Likes
- 11 Posts
- 19 Reply Likes
And that's the surprising thing - if you look at the cast credits pages, what actually did change or even improve? As far as I can tell, the only change is the removal of the copy-from-episodes widget. Why was it even touched?
- 10 Posts
- 11 Reply Likes
Why is it better to have to type in all the names of the cast, including all that had made previous appearances. Why would you remove that function? I've been making a fair number of contributions, but if I have to go back to typing every letter of every name. I will have to call it quits. Lives too short, for that much frustration. Bronco46
- 11 Posts
- 10 Reply Likes

The box alignment is extremely jacked-up which makes it difficult to follow especially when the section is long and the headers aren't on the page anymore. There is also the random thick black line which seems to be a minor cosmetic issue, but may be indicative of another issue.
Adrian, Champion
- 1680 Posts
- 2053 Reply Likes
Rachel, Employee
- 119 Posts
- 219 Reply Likes
- 11 Posts
- 19 Reply Likes
- 238 Posts
- 197 Reply Likes
If you hadn't disabled pinch/zoom, scrolling wouldn't have been a "problem".
Just now seeing this change and find it less useful. See image below, where you could once add a dozen or more credits, now you can only add 4 before scrolling.

- 10 Posts
- 11 Reply Likes
Bronco46
- 207 Posts
- 454 Reply Likes
The old form may not be pretty, but it doesn't need to be. It's functional and everything appears in predictable and logical places. And please don't underestimate the importance of "predictable" in that sentence: "muscle memory" plays a very significant role in repeated tasks such as submitting contributions.
Adrian, Champion
- 1680 Posts
- 2053 Reply Likes
Rachel, Employee
- 119 Posts
- 219 Reply Likes
I'm replying here given the amount of feedback provided. Here is an update:-
- "Click to copy existing credits" - This was a bug and unintended, it is now fixed. Please let me know if there are any further issues with this.
- The layout issue described by 'thebluetuna' on Chrome, we are trying to reproduce (and have been unsuccessful so far). We'll keep trying.
- With regards to the feedback on the responsive experience (described by Ron and in a separate thread here -> https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/topics/recent-site-update-has-corrupted-formatting-of-cast-update-p...), we've listened to the feedback and will disable the responsive feature when we detect you are using desktop. The team are working on that now, I'll need to get back to you with an ETA.
Cheers,
Rachel
- 11 Posts
- 19 Reply Likes
With regards to the points around involving our contributors before making these types of changes. We have been attempting to do that far more this year (as Peter called out), to get early feedback on this type of change.But are the processes in place to handle feedback? As Peter points out the missing functionality was reported. Was this acknowledged? Was it prioritized as blocker? What was the follow up? What went wrong that any fix in that regard didn't end up in production?
It's nice to ask for feedback and I'm sure many will want to contribute, but if the follow up is non-existent, it's just window dressing.
In any case, thank the developers for the fix.
P.S. If 24 hours is the minimum turn around time, these processes definitely need to be put in place.
Adrian, Champion
- 1680 Posts
- 2053 Reply Likes
- 207 Posts
- 453 Reply Likes
There is a huge amount of diversity amongst contributors; for example some focus on particular areas of the database more than others, and there's a wide range of different approaches and workflows. As such, you need to be seeking feedback from a much larger group, representing a much wider range of contributors than a dozen Champions.
As Peter pointed out, 'Champion' is not synonymous with 'contributor', so those you asked may or may not be actively contributing at the moment (and may or may not have even seen your request). I mean absolutely no disrespect to any Champions; my point is only that no group that small can hope to fully reflect the whole community.
If you don't initially want to invite feedback from everyone here, then ask last year's top 250 contributors (or limit it to the top 100 if you want to exclude annoying old me!). Or ask a hundred contributors who were most active over the last month. I would suggest an absolute minimum of 50 active contributors for your feedback group. Hopefully that will be enough to ensure that their interests collectively cover the full range of title types and data sections. Any less than that, and important issues are going to be missed.
Rachel, Employee
- 119 Posts
- 219 Reply Likes
As soon as we saw the issue raised on this thread, we researched and fixed as soon as we could today.
I've told the team you've thanked them (as have I).
Cheers,
Rachel
- 11 Posts
- 19 Reply Likes
Adrian, Champion
- 1680 Posts
- 2053 Reply Likes
I appreciate what you are saying but also, as a computer scientist, know that it is unreasonable that a platform, such as IMDb, that runs over so many os/browsers/devices, etc to launch new features/designs and be completely bug free. No amount of testing will ever solve that problem especially for distribute platforms with millions of users that all may use it in a slightly different way.
I'm a champion and also a top 50 (maybe top 25) contributor. I, for one, would never consider trying to edit an IMDb page on my phone. Given the lack of physical keyboard (I miss my blackberries!), it just seems prone to error and you have nowhere near the geographical space. (I'm typing this using a 35" monitor.) I'm guessing most top contributors do so on an actual computer, not a tablet or moble device. This is one of the reasons I ignored the thread in the Champions Corner because I thought it was solely a mobile platform update.
I know it can be frustrating but time pressures and feedback from hundreds or more users is also frustrating for the support team and the developers. I'm pretty amazed that they fixed the problem with the box missing in 24 hours and rolled that out to all platforms.
- 11 Posts
- 19 Reply Likes
I'm pretty amazed that they fixed the problem with the box missing in 24 hours and rolled that out to all platforms.As a webdeveloper, I think that's far too long. This feature's priority for contributors is similar to a share button not working social media sites. It doesn't totally make the product useless, but it's pretty far up there. Turn around times for that is 4 hours max.
In webdevelopment feature toggles are not a new thing any more and so the first thing to do would be to turn off the feature toggle that causes the issue. This shouldn't take longer than an hour. If it does, your update community and keep doing periodic updates.
But I think that's the underlying issue: we're dealing with an enterprise and not an agile organization. There's no scripted end to end testing and so the burden is on Rachel to catch mistakes and she has my sympathies. With scripted e2e multiple tests involving the previous episodes box would've failed and this would've blocked a roll out at the CI stage.
Another a big tell tale is that common UI/UX patterns that exist in sites for years are not applied here: its forms and processing is that of I'd say 2008-ish where you had decent scripting support, but UX was still an emerging discipline. For example: I have to read in the email that I submitted duplicate entries. Modern UI's don't allow duplicates if they're not allowed and there's 3 events where you can verify it (row change and form submission (recheck+final)).
Atomic actions are divided in multiple steps: edit, edit what, ok now edit it. Add actors, how many, ok, fill these out, I'll ignore any empty - modern UIs just start with known data and one blank form at top or bottom, with "add another row". I'm not even touching dynamic updates, drafts and data loss through accidental navigation. We've done away a lot of the patterns used here a long time ago and improved user protections and client side validation.
That's why I think it's important this focus on mobile usability should be put on the back-burner. They're trying to be more modern, but they still have to catch up on 10-15 years of innovation for the desktop platform.
And as you correctly state, power users of the contribution platform live on the desktop. There may be more unique users that use mobile devices (people doing quick updates of their own movie/profile), but if you look at number of submissions per platform, I'd be astonished if mobile has any meaningful share.
- 207 Posts
- 453 Reply Likes
Quick example: I'm quite sure that many, many contributors, like Martin, use narrower browser windows; a larger test group would have identified that issue early, so it could be addressed before it affected everyone on launch day. And, of course, a larger group would have more chances to notice that the copy-from-other-episodes problem had not been fixed, and could have followed up on that before today.
As for feedback overwhelming the team, I would have thought that constructive feedback from those who understand that they're testing something new is far more welcome than the many complaints that arise when a flawed system is launched for everyone (and don't be fooled by the numbers I suggested; in any given group invited to give feedback, less than half will actually comment).
Out of curiosity (or accuse me of being too nosey if you want), how many Champions actually provided feedback on this when it was first raised with you?
I, for one, would never consider trying to edit an IMDb page on my phone.Has anyone told the software team this? That's half the problem with this update: prioritising mobile devices without giving enough consideration to the impact on desktop, when mobile is clearly the wrong tool for significant contributions.
Rachel, Employee
- 119 Posts
- 219 Reply Likes
The team spent a lot of time testing the feature, and addressing all (but one) of the bugs, and assessed potential UX changes that we anticipated would cause issues.
You can only get the complete breadth of feature feedback once you put it in front of people who use it every day.
We try to do that to a subset of contributors before we launch changes, but you can never anticipate every scenario.
Martin's thread, and his photo of how he contributes data with a resized browser next to a streaming window has been extremely insightful to us, and given this, and other feedback, we're changing the CX and will disable the responsive feature when we detect you are using desktop.
On the mobile contribution point, the intent of this feature was to have an almost zero impact on the 'desktop' contribution experience (and we'd have gotten away with it if it wasn't for that pesky 'copy-from-other-episode' bug and anticipating the 'resized browser' experience').
The feature launch is to move closer to achieving parity in contribution experiences for customers who would choose to contribute from a mobile device. Our lack of parity in mobile contribution experiences has been a long-term pain point we regularly receive feedback on.
If individuals on this thread would like to work with us on providing more insights into how you use our contribution experiences, the team would love to hear more.
Cheers,
Rachel
- 207 Posts
- 453 Reply Likes
I do think you're very much heading in the right direction in terms of testing and getting feedback before full launch, my only concern is that I think you've underestimated the number of contributors needed to help you with this (but I'll stop going on about that now).
As for "mobile parity" (great phrase, by the way!), I'm well aware that I'm probably the odd one out on this. I know it's very fashionable these days for websites to pretend that a desktop is just a big mobile device and not worry about it much as long as the same design looks good on a tiny screen. In my opinion, "same design for all devices" rarely works well for more than a few of the "all devices" it's trying to cover. But that's just me. I don't like it, but I've long since accepted that most of the web wants everything to look and act just like mobile these days.
If you're not sick of me already, please consider me a volunteer for future feedback, I'd be happy to help (and I'll do my best to be more constructive and less complaining).
Thanks
Rachel, Employee
- 119 Posts
- 219 Reply Likes
Feedback if a gift, and myself and the team appreciate you and all the other individuals on this thread taking the time to provide it.
We'll give some thought into how we can widen the net for getting more feedback for contribution feature changes like this when they are at the beta phase.
Thanks for offering to get involved.
Cheers,
Rachel
- 4648 Posts
- 6268 Reply Likes
I have made several improvement suggestions for IMDb
Joel, IMDb Customer Service, and others from Help Desk
says that these need to be voted on by GS Members / IMDb Users
They are still waiting for more votes
So, how many voted for Your changes ? ?
.
- 207 Posts
- 454 Reply Likes
First up, in the episode title correction section...

Note that the input for series title is extending beyond it's table cell and overlapping the next input; and also the explanation row is running away at the right.
That led me to checking other sections too (including a few I don't normally use!)...
The runaway explanation row seems to affect the sections for title corrections; episode title corrections; cast/crew verification; and production/development status.

The overlapping or escaping input fields seem to appear in the sections for opening weekend; weekend gross; theatrical rentals (both amount and year field for those 3); movie connections; and episode title correction.


Unless I've missed anything, all other sections seem to be ok.
Thanks
Related Categories
-
Data Issues & Policy Discussions
- 30045 Conversations
- 4504 Followers







Rachel, Employee
Cheers,
Rachel