I find the 'Recently Added' menu for TV shows not very useful. Most of the time it displays either the latest episodes from a show (which I may not want to watch if I didn't watch all the previous episodes first) or it is cluttered by all the episodes of the season of a specific show I just added.
I think displaying only shows that the user may be interested to watch *right now* would increase the user experience of this menu.
Let's say that 'an episode E is watchable if and only if all the episodes before E have been watched' (so any S01E01 episode would be watchable as there is no episode before it).
The replacement for the 'Recently Added' menu ('Suggestions' maybe?) would only display episodes which are watchable. This would fix two issues from the current menu:
- The menu being full of all the episodes of a newly added season
- The menu suggesting me to watch the S03E04 episode of a show while I didn't finish watching the first season yet.
As the number of shows displayed in this menu are very limited we could increase the chance of displaying an episode that the user is actually going to watch by using some heuristic to order watchable episodes.
Let's say that 'a show is active if contains at least one episode tagged as watched'.
- An episode from an active show has a higher priority than one from an inactive show
- An episode from an active show has a higher priority than one from another active show if its latest episode has been watched more recently
- An episode recently added to the library has a higher priority than one being in it since a while.
With this kind of filtering and ordering, it's much more likely that user will find the next episode is was planning to watch.
What do you guys think about all this? If anything, could it be done as a plugin to experiment first?
I think displaying only shows that the user may be interested to watch *right now* would increase the user experience of this menu.
Let's say that 'an episode E is watchable if and only if all the episodes before E have been watched' (so any S01E01 episode would be watchable as there is no episode before it).
The replacement for the 'Recently Added' menu ('Suggestions' maybe?) would only display episodes which are watchable. This would fix two issues from the current menu:
- The menu being full of all the episodes of a newly added season
- The menu suggesting me to watch the S03E04 episode of a show while I didn't finish watching the first season yet.
As the number of shows displayed in this menu are very limited we could increase the chance of displaying an episode that the user is actually going to watch by using some heuristic to order watchable episodes.
Let's say that 'a show is active if contains at least one episode tagged as watched'.
- An episode from an active show has a higher priority than one from an inactive show
- An episode from an active show has a higher priority than one from another active show if its latest episode has been watched more recently
- An episode recently added to the library has a higher priority than one being in it since a while.
With this kind of filtering and ordering, it's much more likely that user will find the next episode is was planning to watch.
What do you guys think about all this? If anything, could it be done as a plugin to experiment first?