New YouTube Homepage: My Thoughts
YouTube has rolled out a new homepage (click here to try it out) and I, being a love of new design - and it’s critique - feel like giving my thoughts on it..
First, let me give you some details. Here’s the button that will appear on your homepage if you’ve been selected to join the experiment:
That button will bring you to this page, detailing the changes about to take effect on your homepage (what you see when logged in and viewing http://youtube.com):
In text form, here’s what the page says:
Experimental YouTube homepage Want to use a different version of the YouTube homepage?
What we’re trying out: Combined list - Merges your subscriptions, friend activity, and recommendations into > one easier-to-scan list Don’t miss a video - If a channel uploads 4 videos in a day, you’ll see all 4 - instead of just the latest video Delete anything - Hover over any video you don’t want to watch and click ‘x’ Or just grey it out - Videos you’ve already watched will be greyed out - so even > without deleting, you’ll know where you left off Help me re-find stuff I just watched - Your homepage will include your recent likes and favorites so you can easily get back to them Easy inbox - Links to your inbox (personal messages & comments) are front and center Load much more - Watch older videos - all without leaving the homepage
Quick tip: If you only care about your subscriptions, just click on “Subscription uploads” at the top - we’ll remember your setting
And finally, a before-and-after comparison of the old and new homepages:
OK. There are a few things right off the bat that I’ve noticed. Just as a sidenote, I closed the massive TRON advertisement at the top of the new layout in order to show as much of it as possible.
First, I like that this layout is focusing on bringing things that your fellow YouTubers like, comment on, or favorite to your attention. This is brought directly from your Friends and Subscriptions in to one “merged” list. If someone who you’re friends with liked, commented or favorited a video, it will show up here along with any new videos from the people you’ve subscribed to.
That being said, I highly dislike that the Friends activity is now merged with the Subscriptions. It’s a good thing that if you click Subscriptions that YouTube will remember your settings (hopefully) but even when you set that to the default there are more problems.
Within the Subscriptions tab there need to be a few changes. I like that you can see all recent uploads from a content creator, but what if that person has only uploaded one video within the recent time period? They still take up just as much vertical space as someone with four new videos. An option to consolidate the people with only one recent upload in to fewer lines (most likely by putting two, three or four different content creators on one single row) would be most helpful. That would allow us to scroll less and lessen the chance of possibly missing a new video because it’s below the page-break.
Another feature that needs to be gone: greyed out video thumbnails after a certain video is viewed.
When you watch a video from someone you’re subscribed to, that video thumbnail doesn’t simply disappear from your homepage subscription box. Instead, it becomes “greyed out” (so it looks faded) and you then have to click a small “x” in the corner of the thumbnail to remove it from the list. This is simply redundant work for the user, and adding more steps to the subscription-viewing process is really quite dumb.
One more little thing that really annoyed me was this:
First, my username is truncated due to length, which makes no sense. It should allow the max number of characters possible in a username to be visible. Partial username visibility is just plain lame in this advanced web world. Second, what’s with the odd alignment of the username? I want to see the beginning of my name just as much as I want to see the end of it. Of all the new changes, this should b the easiest fix to implement.
So that’s it. Those are my thoughts on the new YouTube homepage redesign. After more time getting used to it I assume I’ll have more thoughts, but this is a good stopping point for now. But I want to know what you think about the new design. I’m genuinely interested in finding out your thoughts. Tell me below: Love it? Hate it?
Thanks for reading! :)
