Unfortunately, Google/YouTube and others have lost the plot and no longer employ good UX professionals in their flagship products.
Sites like Booking.com do this to the umpteenth degree.
Short-sighted optimization for engagement is the cause of an overwhelming majority of the problems on the Internet.
It feels so fantastically “pushy” to start playing the audio of some random junk that just happened to be under the selection reticle.
They helpfully added a configuration option to turn this behaviour off, which is a tacit admission that it’s a misfeature that users want to disable.
It does nothing.
The videos still play.
But yeah, hover is just for info about the thing you're about to click, not pretending I've already clicked it when I haven't.
The stupid thing about Youtube is that sometimes a video starts playing on hover, in the thumbnail and without sound, and then I actually do click it because indeed it is something I want to watch, and then I miss the first couple of seconds because it's already shown those, with the sound off. It's just the most bizarrely stupid UI decision I can think of.
This was such a common thing to test for in fluid layouts under AIR/AS3/Flex, or any previous lingua franca where you had to design and code your own rollover effects or web components. So much is elided in mouseout and mouseover. Really, unless you've coded those events in a stack from movements, you don't understand what they mean. In any UI, it's the #1 thing you have to watch out for (along with stuck hovers, accidental focus and things like that). Mouseover/out depend on the entire screen graph as well as timing to establish user intent. Thrashing the whole UI off that because you shift the layout is the worst example of how to do it wrong. Amateur hour.
I weep for this new generation of web developers. So much more complexity, leaving little time for studying and nailing well-established HCI principles, which used to be less of an issue when web was simpler.
What vexes me is that I learned these principles from companies like Google in the first place.
I have literally no idea what people are learning now in academies before being set loose to do front-end work, but obviously it's mediated through so many libraries that they haven't had much time to consider what's going on behind low-level user interactions and load sequences.
/edit: It still plays videos on hover after changing it. Only now there is no player popup anymore.
Slightly related, but does anyone know how come Netflix's search algorithm (for lack of a better word) and its general search-related UI is so bad? A specific use-case that I had a few days ago was that I wanted to watch a nice comedy movie, preferably not from the last few years.
There was no easy filter on time periods, nor a filter on the country where that movie was made (I was thinking of filtering on France or Italy at some point), no way to tell Netflix "show me all the movies employing this actor" that you have in your catalogue, nothing of the sorts. In the end I think I searched for "Belmondo comedy" or something asinine like that, which, sure enough, after some horizontal scrolling (?!?!) ended up by recommending me a Tom Hanks comedy from the 1980s. I did not watch Netflix that evening.
How do people find stuff on this platform?
Accidentally click on some white space? Well too bad, we’ve closed whatever you’re looking at, even though you’re not in a modal. Oh and also, you’ll need to wait 30-seconds for this new page to load, and you can’t just bail out and go back a page, because your browser can’t hold the previous page in cache/memory properly because it’s some overly-complicated JS app.
Then I wonder where the Description and Acceptance Criteria are for the next User Story, because it remembers that you (accidentally) contracted the Description for User Story X therefore you obviously don't want to see it for any others...
This gets doubly frustrating when navigational elements don't contain actual anchor links. If you long-tap on mobile to open in a new tab, the browser decides you are selecting text and there is almost no way to dismiss the resulting copy/etc popup without tapping elsewhere on the page - which you cannot do without navigating elsewhere or otherwise causing an unwanted action.
No one told me it had to be perfect, but I care about the user and don't ever want the user to be surprised.
That's the difference you get with outsourcing your engineering team vs developing in-house. If you choose a good team, your developers feel directly responsible for the user experience, go beyond stated requirements, and aren't just doing the bare minimum in order to make a paycheck. A good UX professional is constantly testing their work with unexpected input.
I value polish for its own sake highly as I think you do too, a well made tool is more rewarding to use. But the ones forecasting developer effort need a concrete justification. So it's best to just sneak this in if you can and hope other people you work with feel the same, after all it's much quicker to do it up front than to lose context and revisit it later. Asking permission will cost far more than your 30 minutes.
It may even be the same thing you described, if they somehow managed to attach a sound to an animation instead of a handler.
Then I don't have to guess if there is anything to scroll.
And an additional complaint about those tiny-thin scroll bars that some idiot-designer though were slick because they so minimally interfere with the rest of 1920px-width display, which also makes them a giant pain-in-the-wrist to click on because the width to make it appear is so thin, and then clicking on the scroller is another challenge whereby it's much easier to accidentally make the scroll bar disappear. Rinse and repeat.
I used to be half-decent at railgun in Q3A, but I now struggle to hit scroll bars. That's a fucking design problem.
(because I'm an idiot, not because the reply text shifted on the page)