UPDATED NextBox Navigatr - December 2015/January 2016

[park]

@websurferdude wrote:

When i read that someone in North York had received Navigatr software overnight, i decided to turn my TV & PVR to see if i had it and sure as the sun rose in the East this morning, i had it too.

First thing i noticed was how small the guide was.  The good news was that all my recordings and scheduled recordings were present.  I played around with the recorded/scheduled recording filter.  So far, it looks better than i imagined (the fact that my recordings/scheduled recordings were preserved is a blessing in itself!)  Tomorrow will be the day i'm either pleasantly suprised or reaching for my 8300HD box!

I have followed each and every post on this thread and would like to offer my profound thanks for those techies (and regular users) on here (esp. Bruce!) who have given us 2nd (3rd) rounders of the Navigatr software the wherewithal to move around the software due to their patience in figuring certain parts of it out.  I think i speak for all who received the Navigatr software that we thank those guinea pigs who paved the way to (hopefully!) maneuver the maze that is Navigatr.

What they should have done after the July fiasco is hire the techies (Bruce, et al.)  to come down to Roger's HQs and create a workable PVR software.  Your pay could have been a year's worth of free cable TV or something along those lines.  Heaven knows, you guys probably could have done a much better job in a more speedier fashion!

We offered.  But as @BS said  no takers.

At least they took the key points in this version. They got a few more to go though.

Eg cc and returning to where you left off.

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[jimboden]

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@OLDYELLR wrote:

Thanks for the detailed explanation. I'm sure it will help a lot of Nextbox users and Navigatr victims. I have an 8300 and have yet to figure out how to turn on CC, although I don't need it. I remember when you could turn on CC on any TV by just pressing the Mute button. Why can't these brainiacs incorporate that into Navigatr instead of requiring a zillion button presses?

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@OLDYELLR

I rarely use CC, but here's how you do it in 5 clicks. Press Menu, arrow up twice, where you'll see CC Off/On, press either the left or right arrow key, press Select. Repeat the same procedure to turn it off.

[jimboden]

I have an elderly friend whose brain is not wired to deal with anything even slightly technical. She can't even figure out how to make sure that her Nextbox and TV both power on at the same time. She often relies on other people to help her. She's in Toronto and I warned her about the impending Navigatr update. I know it's going to drive her crazy and she'll probably throw her hands up in the air out of sheer frustration.

I also fall into the elderly category, but I've been a "tech geek" all my adult life. This kind of stuff doesn't faze me at all because I'm very logical and good at detail. I can usually figure out something very quickly. The reality is not all people are like me and tech problems drive them crazy. This roll out is likely to cause a lot of trouble for people who are like my friend. I hope Rogers has a lot of extra people on its phone lines and live chat, because they're going to need them.

[jgross]

My cable boxes got updated yesterday to the new Navigatr. There has been an improvement in speed on some functions, and the new software looks nice, but apart from that it is a dramatically inferior experience to the previous interface. Here are some of the issues I encountered within the first few minutes:

• When playing or moving through a recording, the timeline at the bottom of the screen now shows only the amount of time left in the recording. Important information is no longer provided. Previously it showed either:
• the start time, current time and end time (for shows currently being recorded)
• zero at the start and the total length at the end, with the current time within that range (for shows that had been fully recorded earlier)
• Shows that are currently being recorded do not show up in the Recorded list until the recording is complete. You have to look in the Future Recordings list. This is very counter-intutitive
• After deleting a recording, I expect to go back to where I was in the list of recordings. Instead I'm bumped back to the start of the list, which is jarring, and makes me do more scrolling if I am deleting a series of things.
• Deleting is still quite slow (though not as miserably slow as it used to be)
• There should be an option to show shows in list form. The thumbnail/poster view is pretty, but it wastes space, slows things down, and makes it harder to see what is where.
• When I search for a show and find many episodes of it, they are listed in what appears to be a random order.
• When shows are listed alphabetically, the leading "The" should be ignored to produce an intuitive sort. The Daily Show and The Flash wind up farther down the list than expected.
• My several recordings of Doctor Who from Christmas Day are not collected in one folder the way  all my other shows are; they each show up as their own poster and thus waste a lot of screen space.
• There is no way to separately view Previous Recording only and Future recordings only. The mixing of previous recordings, future sceduled recordings, and those that are programmed but have no known future recording dates (each sorted within their own group) is confusing and unintuitive.
• The arrangement of the alphabet in the Search window has been changed to make it much more work to spell things out. Two rows of 13 letters each means much more left-to-right clicking, compared to the more compact square arrangement of letters in the previous version.
• The screen layout of the TV guide page has a lot of empty space; it could show more channels at a time and reduce the need to scroll.
• Please provide an option to supress the More Like This information. It wastes screen space, is distracting, and almost never actually succeeds at suggesting related shows I might want to watch. I think this feature is completely useless, and its presence makes the experience worse at all times.
• Delete All Recordings is unclear; I worried it would delete all recordings of all shows! The name of this button should clearly indicate it deletes all recordings of this show only.

Overall, it is clear that the priority was entirely on making the new Navigatr look pretty (and it does!), with little or no consideration for usability. Throughout the software, the user needs to click more to do what they want to do, and the screen space is either wasted or filled with things I don't want to see. Was any user testing done on this, and if so, did anyone listen to the feedback?

[Gdkitty]

In some ways, i really wish they would roll out a slightly more ADVANCED DTA.

HD.

No guide even.

But full access to all channels.

Make it as simple as possible for basic, elderly, etc people. 

Channel up / down, volume, and number select buttons.

[Gdkitty]

A lot of this has been echoed by other users.
(i have asked for these to be merged on the other navigatr thread)

• Please provide an option to supress the More Like This information. It wastes screen space, is distracting, and almost never actually succeeds at suggesting related shows I might want to watch. I think this feature is completely useless, and its presence makes the experience worse at all times.

[dayzed007]

@Gdkitty

They couldn't possibly offer such an interface, since 95% of people would use it, then they couldn't justify the price hike they announced for April (improved service).

I've experienced almost yearly 'improved service' price hikes, yet here I sit with a paper weight in front of my TV for an update that I had no interest in.

As an FYI, I'm a User Experience proffesional.  I see an updated interface in Navigatr, but not an improved experience (worse in some cases).  The term we use for this kind of thing is "putting lipstick on the pig".  They solved nothing, forced it on all, and in many cases like my own, killed my box along with all recordings 😞 Worse, they were warned that this would happen and I'm sure braced themselves for it.  What they failed to do was keep an army of service trucks ready to go out and serve those customers that they abandond.

[SAN2016]

Good morning.  Before the pvr navigator update came into effect I could sort my recordings by date or by title.  Now it only appears to sort by title.  Is there a way to show a list of my recordings by date (not by topic) as well?

[ADM12]

It is now a week since my call to Rogers regarding a blank Settings Screen on navigatr and apparently Rogers closed my ticket but without a resolution, although they claim they have resolved the problem.  There are many things that I can accept, but incompetence is not one of those.  Effective this morning I cancelled my Rogers Plan and have taken a writeoff on my Nextbox, to which I have owned for 3 years now.  I can live with that and I trust that Rogers can live with the $3500 a year loss that their foolish behaviour has brought onto them.  I wish many of you hope and success with your problems, but for me this was the straw that broke my back.  I cannot accept being disresprected and being treated as though I am the one that caused all the problems.  Thats enough and I'm finished with them...Rogers brought ALL of this onto themselves.  Good riddance.

[Brt]

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@jimboden wrote:

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@OLDYELLR wrote:

Thanks for the detailed explanation. I'm sure it will help a lot of Nextbox users and Navigatr victims. I have an 8300 and have yet to figure out how to turn on CC, although I don't need it. I remember when you could turn on CC on any TV by just pressing the Mute button. Why can't these brainiacs incorporate that into Navigatr instead of requiring a zillion button presses?

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@OLDYELLR

I rarely use CC, but here's how you do it in 5 clicks. Press Menu, arrow up twice, where you'll see CC Off/On, press either the left or right arrow key, press Select. Repeat the same procedure to turn it off.

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Thanks @jimboden but we all agree that it's only a few clicks .... from live TV ... however the real problem is doing this while watching a recorded program. I challenge you to name that tune in anything under ten clicks. 

Cheers,

Brett