Hire a New Team to Work on UI
As a viewer who only sparingly watches any stream other than the small handful I like and would actively not like to see a bunch of streams I don't have any interest in, every single aspect of this UI update is terrible, inconvenient, ugly, obtuse, and otherwise was a bad move. When I go to a channel I do want to watch that's offline, I'm assaulted by whatever person that streamer is hosting and have no option to either stop the hosted channel from appearing or to remove the elements I don't like from the offline page. The offline page is hideous, the background to this little tiles thing is blindingly bright, and if I pause the hosted stream, like I do instantly every time, and scroll through those tabs? When I come back around the video starts again. Literally the only thing I want to see or have ever wanted to see when I go to a stream that's offline is the offline image of that streamer.
The blog post that led me here said that community and streamer feedback was involved in this process, but I find that hard to believe given how this type of update has traditionally gone over on every single platform that's done it. If you had actually taken feedback from people, you would have realized that no one ever likes UI updates, they simply tolerate them long enough to become the new (worse) normal until the site redesigns again, and again, and again, and eventually becomes so utterly unusable that people leave for more user-friendly alternatives. This is why at a certain point in Twitter's endless tinkering with the layout of their site, Tweetdeck became a thing; it's a simpler, more straightforward way to access the same content minus the UI problems on the main site.
BTTV's options did a lot of that simplifying and easing for me before the update, and it's an incredibly common and popular extension for both streamers and viewers because of this (and the emotes). I was positively GIDDY when I found out I could stop seeing hosted streamers, for example, or move the chat to the left of the screen, or change the background color every other message to make the chat more readable. Y'know, quality of life features Twitch should already have and doesn't for some reason. Probably because the team that would be implementing those QoL features was too busy for a year creating a new layout, if I had to guess. It doesn't help my opinion when the general consensus seems to be that there are obvious features missing, which tells me that a year was absolutely not enough time to get this completed and taken live globally.
So, here's my idea. Fire everyone involved in this decision from the top down, hire the BTTV people, and let them clean up the last team's mess. I realize you probably paid some graphic designers a very good amount of money to make this for you. I mean it took a year! Unfortunately, the end result is awful. Take it as a lesson and hire someone with any amount of talent or understanding of the platform to fix it.
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AlwaysSmug commented
When you make such a big UX change, please try and make it feel familiar to what we have grown custom and familiar with. Enhance certain aspects such as Quality of Life, accessibility, and navigability. These updates to the design that are pushed all over the place in chunks are quickly turning into a maze to navigate and use.
We have two different setting pages one for stream dashboard and the one that is the old page. The old settings page has a mix of old and new settings but with (lazy/low effort) redirects to the new one instead of releasing a product that has completly integrated itself into the old environment.
You have also decided to remove Quality of Life (it felt like the opposite of QoL when you deprecated them at least) links such as clips.twitch.tv subdomain that would have redirected you to your clip page.
I loved this. Quick and easy shortcut, now I have to traverse through a bipolar UX design of a maze that is only released in chunks and is pushed to live.Stop removing good features. Publish an optional redesign, at the very least for a finite amount of time, so people can transition smoothly into this new environment and not be forced out of their comfort zone.
Despite the hate twitter has gotten for their redesign, at least they started it off with an opt-in mostly finished version which then rolled out over time, and for the most time, you could opt back into the old one.
Don't fall into the trap which Reddit is doing now which makes the site miserable nightmare to navigate while removing core functionality (actually reading all comments). Their redesign honestly made me stop using the site altogether as reading comments just suddenly drifts onto another post while I just want to read the thread I clicked in the first place. But hey, at least Reddit still has their "old" subdomain which gives me the freedom of choice.