The New YouTube Design
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YouTube has made the biggest redesign of their site since the worlds most popular video service debuted in 2005. Executives at YouTube said the redesign was necessary if they were truly trying to compete with other online video services and television itself.
According to an article in The New York Times, the average television viewer watches five hours a day. On comparison, the average YouTube viewer only spends 15-minutes per day on YouTube. Shiva Rajaraman, a senior product manager with YouTube, was quoted in the same article as saying, “We want users to leave because they run out of time, not because they run out of things to watch.”
Maybe YouTube will eventually change their slogan from “YouTube: Broadcast Yourself” to “YouTube: Watch Us Until You Die.”
The video service is not lacking in the video department, as the company has reported that more than 20 hours of video is uploaded to the site every minute. The reason YouTube redesigned the site was to remove the clutter and keep viewers on the site longer. One of the ways they did this was by eliminating the 5-star rating system in favor of a Roger Ebert-like system. If users like the video, they will click the “Thumbs Up” button. Dislike? Press “Thumbs Down.” Not entirely a new concept, since the video site FunnyorDie.com was founded on this system, but the two-choice review option keep it simple. More importantly, it allows YouTube to guide you to your next favorite video.
YouTube will track your reviews and thus will recommend new content for you based on your personal tastes — a highlight of the new YouTube homepage where users can modify the page like iGoogle. Don’t care about the videos that are “currently being watched” by others, unclick that module. The individual user controls how much clutter the homepage has now.
Other big design changes include moving the description of each video to below the video and the uploader’s username to above the video. A simple click of a tab next to the uploader’s username and all of his or her videos pop up in a scroll box. Click the views tab in the bottom right corner and the “YouTube Insight Statistics” pop open showing the viewer detailed information about what Web sites the video has been embedded on — something that will surely be popular with sites that survive on embedded YouTube clips — and what region of the world the video is most popular in. YouTube Insights is not new, but YouTube is now highlighting this service with the redesign.
Another new redesign feature is that viewers can also rate individual comments, and can also add @tags when replying to specific users. Now, instead of the last comment posted, viewers can read the “most popular” comments. Hopefully this will curb the amount of racist and homophobic comments that are left on the site, as these comments should be buried in Digg-like fashion.
Already people are complaining about the Youtube redesign as if it was the end of the world. Most people do not like change, and YouTube probably knew this for quite some time before the update and even released a Beta version several months ago before unleashing it to the public. Quickly, the comments will die down because although the design has changed, the function is still the same.
This happens every time Facebook changes their look — which happens a lot more often than YouTube does. People are outraged and leave status messages informing all their “friends” about their outrage. A few months later everyone has forgotten, until Facebook changes it again.
People do not use YouTube, or Facebook, because they like the design. They go to those sites because of the service they provide. They use YouTube because they like watching videos and YouTube is still the best place to view videos of people falling down, new music videos and incredible moments captured on cell phone cameras.
Posted on 04/3/10
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Back To Blog - Tags: New York Times, YouTube
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