Contribution Experience Update: Responsive CX

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Hi,

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



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Rachel, Employee

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Posted 4 days ago

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BONAFIDE BOSS ⭐️

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 Android layout: 


[ Device: Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ (plus) ]

Not as beautiful as iOS. CSS doesn't function the same on Android.

But still, thank you for improving it.
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Rachel, Employee

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Thanks for the feedback, and the detail on your device type.

Cheers,

Rachel
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Vylmen

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Judging from this, this and this, a lot more went live then your notes above. Is anyone moving to fix things?
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Rachel, Employee

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We are looking, thanks for the feedback.
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Vylmen

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Vital functionality is still not back to accommodate aesthetic changes for a platform that only contributes a fraction of the content and even that hasn't been done right.

This is a textbook example for pressing the rollback button and trying again next week.
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Adrian, Champion

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The boxes missing for previous episodes of series is a pretty big oversight. That is going to make adding episode level credits much more difficult.
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Vylmen

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Yeah, I'm holding off till it's fixed or an alternative deployed. The chance of messing up spelling or wrong role for actor is just too annoying to deal with in the aftermath. Especially when you're adding credits to a series in a language you don't speak. I mean, Korean names consist of combinations of about 30-50 words. Mistakes are easily made.
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Adrian, Champion

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I'm opening up a previous episode and editing it so that I can get the correct name of the actor/cast member and character name/position.
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Phil G

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I'm very glad I got my batch of updates for today finished before the change. The copy-from-other-episodes function is near-enough essential for dealing with TV series. It would be nice to see staff fixing bugs instead of breaking our tools.
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Vylmen

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Is there a list somewhere where you can vote what you'd like to have fixed first? Has this been asked by staff at all?
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.
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Phil G

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I have two requests, both of which I've raised before.

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.
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Peter, Champion

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In some cases IMDb have started using a thread that is only accessible to GS 'Champions' to get early feedback on changes (perhaps only those with admin rights). I was able to give feedback on part of this 'Responsive CX'  feature a couple of months ago.

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.
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Adrian, Champion

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I honestly don't remember this thread but May was a pretty bad time for me. It looks like they did a beta on a TV episode so I would be shocked if no one noticed the box for adding people from previous episodes was missed then.
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Peter, Champion

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I did notice that the option to copy credits from previous episodes was missing, and posted about it, but I was testing on mobile and didn't realize that it would be missing on desktop.
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bderoes, Champion

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Also, not all champions are subscribed to the Champions Corner.
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Phil G

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Thanks Peter, it's good to know that at least some effort was made at limited consultation. But given that it took less than an hour for significant problems with display and missing functionality to be reported here yesterday, that approach is clearly not good enough.
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Adrian, Champion

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Having to type in episode credits instead of being able to use the box that said "Click here to copy existing credits....." is time consuming and error prone. This seems to be a MAJOR oversight when IMDb rolled out this new "feature". Do we have an estimate on when this will get fixed or when the whole feature will be rolled back until it isn't missing necessary pieces?
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Vylmen

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The updates mentioned in original post don't touch the series / cast pages at all. It's unlikely they have to do anything with the mobile changes: the change to the copy-from-episodes widget isn't a styling issue - the entire widget is gone, not hidden or moved.

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?
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Robert W

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These changes may seem good to some if you're just looking for esthetics. But when adding whole casts to existing series, it sucks.
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
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thebluetuna

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This is what I see on my laptop (Chrome) when trying to fix the cast and connections:-

 



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.
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Adrian, Champion

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I noticed the spacing was different this morning and that there are those random thick lines but otherwise I didn't see any other difference (except the previously discussed missing box to copy credits from previous episodes.)
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Rachel, Employee

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We are trying to reproduce this issue.
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Vylmen

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I hope you're not talking about the thick lines. Nobody cares about that. What about the missing box? You're saying you have a box with previous cast members?
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Ron

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> 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).

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.
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Robert W

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My experience is that you have trashed the desktop experience while tinkering with the mobile devices. The form is still there for people that are only adding one or two names at a time. But removing the ability to add without typing cast members who have appeared before and need to be added to a episode of a series. I can't speak for others. But I'm not going back to typing each and every name and job description for these TV series. It was fun when you had that resource available to us. But I don't think many of us are going to want to be part of "typing pool.
Bronco46
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Phil G

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Others have helpfully provided screenshots demonstrating the new "design" so I don't need to (thanks all!), for example, here, here, here and here. But I use the word "design" very loosely. What these screenshots show has not been "designed" by any stretch of the imagination; it's just throwing form elements around in a random jumble with no consideration at all to how they'll actually be used. Contributing now includes a bonus game of "guess where the control I'm looking for has jumped to now", which is not helpful. Note that most of these screenshots are from desktop and refute your claim of it being 'almost identical' to the old layout.

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.

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Adrian, Champion

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I'm sorely disappointed that an employee has not responded or acknowledge the loss of funtionality. Editing my normal shows last night took much longer with having to type in all the names and a lot of the cast members positions and then let's not even talk about as attributes with accents in them.
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Rachel, Employee

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Hi,

I'm replying here given the amount of feedback provided.  Here is an update:-

  1. "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.
  2. The layout issue described by 'thebluetuna' on Chrome, we are trying to reproduce (and have been unsuccessful so far). We'll keep trying.
  3. 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.
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.  If there are individuals who are interested (beyond the GS champs) in this type of early insight, we are very open to including you.

Cheers,

Rachel 


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Vylmen

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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.
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Adrian, Champion

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That's for responding about the "Click to copy existing credits" box. I have verified that it is indeed back. Editing television episodes without this is a nightmare. I put off watching one show last night because I need to make so many edits to it and didn't feel like typing them all out.
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Phil G

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Thanks Rachel, it's good to see that you're listening, but this thread demonstrates that your attempts at getting feedback so far are nowhere near enough. I could and would volunteer to help with giving you 'early feedback', but individual volunteers like me won't be enough either.

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.
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Rachel, Employee

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Regarding Peter's feedback on the GS thread, that was a miss on my part for this launch.  We were tracking a number of launch blockers before we made the changes, I missed that one in testing.

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
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Vylmen

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Thank you for your honesty, I appreciate it.
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Adrian, Champion

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Phil G.

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.
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Vylmen

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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.
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Phil G

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Thanks Adrian, but to be clear, I'm not asking for or expecting anything to be completely bug-free. You're right about that, and I very much expect minor issues to be raised in the days and weeks following the launch of any new feature. What I'm hoping for is to help to identify the most obvious bigger issues earlier in the process, so they can be addressed before they affect everyone and start generating complaints.

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.
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Rachel, Employee

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If we put to one side the copy-from-other-episodes problem, which was completely my bad (given it had been reported), rolling out changes to experiences is always a tricky balance.

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
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Phil G

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Rachel, thank you very much for your response here (and earlier too). I very much hope that you (and the team) are not taking my feedback personally or seeing it as unnecessarily harsh. I only go on about these things so much because I care. I very much appreciate all the hard work that this (and other features) represents for you and the team.

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
(Edited)
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Rachel, Employee

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I'm not sick of you ;-)

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
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ACT_1

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Hi!  Rachel, Employee
   
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 ? ?
.
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Phil G

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Rachel, here's a few minor glitches for the team to look at, please. These might sort themselves out when you fix the 'narrow-browser-on-desktop' issue, but they're currently appearing when the browser is wide enough to keep the layout out of 'mobile-mode', so I suspect it's something different going on with these.

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