Liam Dryden

New YouTube homepage

So YouTube have given a new conceptual homepage design to like 1% of users, without any forewarning or consent…

…and God, I hate it so much.

It’s just so bad! I can barely go to the site because I can’t stand it.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of these people who blindly hates change, as long as the change is functional. And this completely isn’t. In fact it poses a huge threat to all people who actually make videos and actively use the site.

I’m gonna go through it bit-by-bit, so this could get long. So if you’re interested, hit the jump for a breakdown.

Merging of Activity and Subscriptions (and Google Plus shares. What?) into one main feed. This means that piled on top of new videos uploaded by your Subscriptions, you also have to see all of their Likes, Favourites, comments, etc, etc. As you can see from the image above, only 1 out of 5 of these posts contains a new upload, and I just got lucky with that. It’s really bad for users who actually want their content to be SEEN by their subscribers.

A list of all the user’s Subscribed Channels has been added at the side, and clicking these shows you that channel’s individual Activity Feed. This is effectively useless because people don’t like to click individual pages just to check for one new video, especially if they have a lot of subscriptions with a lot of Activity themselves.

Clutter. The wide My Channel/Subscriptions/Suggested Channels/Whatever bar at the left, combined with the wholly unnecessary column of Recommended Videos thing at the right, mean the new Feed is squished weirdly in the middle. This means a lot of information has to be squeezed in there in small, vague writing, making it even harder to differentiate between new videos and the usual Liked, Shared etc. The thumbnails are ridiculously big such that only one video per row is possible, meaning a LOT of scrolling. Aesthetically it’s just messy.
Also all this stuff is in the bar on the left and I hate it:

Forced integration with Google Plus. Smooshed into the Activity feed are notifications when someone shares a video via Google+. The site hasn’t been successful and ramming it down people’s throats on every other Google site won’t help that, and it just adds to the clutter.

Apparently that button sits there even if people don’t have Google+. What’s the point?

Thanks to the new greyish background they seem to be going with, the video pages look really unsightly. Also, this:

Get out of here, ugly orange bar, you’re unnecessary and I hate you

There are plenty of other issues, but these are more aesthetic. Overall, the design seems to be catering mostly for either brand new or really casual users, and in a way harks back to one of the much older designs, but with an awful attempt at a social networking platform thrown in. The Feed devalues the actual video uploads as nothing more than another piece of Activity, which can be easily overlooked in favour of a notification of someone commenting on a video.

God I want to opt out but there just doesn’t seem to be an option to do it anywhere. It’s really frustrating.

If you like, you can leave them feedback here. So far virtually all the people who have contributed seem to hate it. So I don’t see this design happening in its current form. But it still poses a risk to regular, active users, and we need to make the design team aware of the fact that we are relevant to the interests of the site’s future.