Official Blog
The Video Page Gets a Makeover
Thursday, January 21, 2010
From the Queen of England to the queen of your 'hood, from aspiring filmmakers to Hollywood studios, from high school graduation videos to citizen reports of revolutionary moments in Iran, it all has a home on YouTube. This creates a really big challenge: how do we design a site that reflects so many different users, experiences and videos? This is a question we've thought about a lot since we launched in 2005. The result of some of this thinking (some might say over-thinking) is a video page chock-full of features that reflect a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but can feel cluttered and a little overwhelming. We've spent a lot of time over the last 10 months asking ourselves some tough questions about this page and posing some of those questions to you in blog posts, roundtable discussions, one-on-one conversations with the community and even on forums like our
Product Ideas for YouTube
page.
Today, we're excited to unveil the first major example of our efforts to simplify and streamline the video page to offer the best possible watching experience to you. To check out this new look all you have to do is opt-in. Click on
this link
to try it out (anyone can opt-in, but for now page elements are only in English). To revert back to the old video page, use the opt-out link at the top of the new video page or opt out
here
. We'll be making the opt-in more easily accessible soon, but we wanted to give our most passionate users a chance to experiment with it early.
Below are some highlights of some of the things that have changed and why. You can also check out our "
Getting Started Guide
" in the Help Center.
Streamlined look and functionality -- the video is the star:
This concept is at the heart of the redesign. YouTube is about creating and watching the world's biggest video collection; therefore, the design should make the video the star. To that end, the new look is more subdued, stripped down and simple than before. The design should help ease users into advanced features, while providing power users with all the functionality they want.
New "next up" video list:
We'll be smarter about queuing up other videos for you to watch on the right side of the page that will take into consideration how you found a video. For example, if you arrived at a video through Search, the rest of the search results will follow you to the playback page so your can continue to browse search results on the video page. The same goes for playlists and recommendations; if that's how you found a video, then that's what will show up on the right side of the page. Again, this is about creating a consistent viewing experience -- and a relevant one when we include context about your viewing intentions.
Description and stats areas united:
More specific information about the video you're watching is now in one place on the page: underneath the video. Click on the "Description" snippet or the Views to see more. This new expand capability works on multiple elements of the page so you won't have to learn a new trick to view each piece of data. The result: less clutter, especially on the right side where you look for the next video to watch.
Cleaned up actions bar:
Actions like sharing, rating, saving or flagging a video are now all grouped in one place, with a cleaner, simpler "button bar." We thought a lot about practicality here, choosing to expose only the most commonly used actions and language for you. And, "Playlists" can now be built via the "Save to" pulldown menu.
Simplified binary ratings:
As we noted in an earlier
blog post
, the rating system on YouTube doesn't really work that well (e.g. only the 1 and 5 star ratings were ever really used). So we moved towards a simpler "Like / Don't Like" model. Liking a video will also save it to your Favorites to make it easy to find those videos again.
New player sizing and video quality controls:
We're adding a new size control into the player that allows you to pick a larger size to watch your video (formally above the player). When you pick the size, we'll serve you the ideal quality. For those of you hungry for more control, you can pick the specific video quality (for example, SD, HD or 1080p) in an associated drop-down menu. We'll warn you when we think there may be a better quality choice, but the control is in your hands.
Search results within the page:
Now you can now search while you're watching a video and results will appear on the right side of the video page, without interrupting the viewing experience.
More prominent channel/subscriber placement and a new "see more videos" feature:
Subscriptions are important to many of you, so we've made it more noticeable by moving the "Subscribe" button to the top of the video right near the title. This also gives anyone the ability to quickly peek at more videos from the creator's channel. (Just click on the arrow next to the number of uploads on the person's channel to see more videos from that user.) You've told us that making you hunt for this information on the page is confusing and many of you wanted this data in one place. This should make it easier to discover more content from videographers you like.
So those are just a few things you'll find in this new video page experience. As with all things on the Web (and in life?), change is hard and can take some time to get used to. That's why we did a lot of research, talked with so many of you and incorporated your thoughts into this latest back-to-basics playback page. So go on and
"opt-in" to give it a whirl
, and let us know what you think either in comments down below or enter feedback via
this survey
. Who knows -- you might see some of your own suggestions in future iterations of the page down the road.
Julian Frumar, User Experience Designer, recently watched "
WTF Collective
," and Igor Kofman, Software Engineer, recently watched "
Zion-I featuring K. Flay - "Coastin'" [The Takeover]
."
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