Amazon has begun a long-overdue upgrade to its user interface.
The upgrade – 18 months in the making – began its rollout on Monday and is expected to be deployed worldwide by the end of the summer. The design impacts both living room devices, such as on smart TVs and Amazon’s own Fire TV devices as well as the Android app. Upgrades to iOS and the web will follow later.
In a blog post, the parcels to showbiz company said the changes would make Prime Video “less busy and overwhelming.”
The familiar rails remain, now with larger rectangular images to promote individual shows and movies.
A simplified navigation menu appears in a vertical sidebar. From there users will find six primary pages: Find, Home, Store, Live TV, Free with Ads and My Stuff. Items that are available as part of the Prime Video package or already purchased are marked with a blue tick, while anything that requires a purchase to rent or keep is indicated with a shopping bag icon.
Find is designed to simplify the search process, allowing users to “search for a specific title,” “explore different genres and collections,” or “filter results by genre or 4K UHD.”
Home features access to other subscriptions, a new Continue Watching rail and a Top 10 of what’s trending elsewhere. A Sports sub menu eases the path to Amazon’s increasing sports slate that has previously been hard to find.
