YouTube has a new design on desktop and everyone is mad about it
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So, long story short, anyone know how I can try out this new style for myself? I can't get it to kick in on any of my devices, even when not signed into my account.
youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.EXPERIMENT_FLAGS.kevlar_watch_grid, false)
YouTube TV is a bit of a joke though.
Most creators make their money from sponsorships and stealth marketing, product placements etc, or regular marketing because they might have an actual paid service to offer.
It seems like some people are better able to handle visual noise. The idea of having autoplay videos on news websites is unthinkable to me, for example. I truly can't comprehend how anybody can stand having a flashing image in their peripheral vision while they're trying to consider a news story. Yet by the lack of public outcry it seems like people are at least fine with them. This YouTube thing seems similar: gaining engagement at the cost of eliminating focus and calm. People complain about environmental pollution but rarely complain about mental pollution.
I'm trying to read text, the video pops on top, I scroll, it gets in the way again...aaughgh!
By the way, I still see it mentioned occasionally, both in YouTube videos themselves (often when someone is talking about YouTube) and amongst my friends. Both as a general complaint about the usability of the site being worse ("I had to wait 90 seconds to realize this video was a waste of time because downvotes are gone") and as an example of a service being able to do whatever it wants without regards to whether users like it or not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_97#/media/Fil...
Compare that will office a 15” widescreen laptop today.
Nonetheless, number of buttons left to right is a weird metric to pick considering even leaving DPI unadjusted doesn't leave a big difference in the actual number of separate horizontal clickable zones https://i.imgur.com/dETv7wY.png. Usually whitespace complaints on Ribbon focus on the extra vertical spacing e.g. section names like "Font" or "Alignment" taking a line of space that used to just be the next row of buttons. That I'll say is actually a little larger in the last 27 years, even after DPI adjustments, just, again, not nearly as much as one would expect for the number of times you hear about it - considering said Ribbon design has had the same minor spacing difference for 17 of those 27 years now.
We’re at the point where resolution isn’t particularly relevant. People want the same UI on a 1080p vs 4k 15” screen because mouse/touchscreen precision and eyesight doesn’t double when resolution doubles.
> Ribbon design has had the same minor spacing difference for 17 of those 27 years now.
In the Win98 days UI was designed for precision mouse movements not trackpads and touchscreens. That’s ultimately what changed Office’s approach, and people using high precision mice just get the short end of the stick here.
But web UI’s have taken this to an even worse extreme seemingly ramping up white space without considering why it was initially shifted.
That is exactly why I'm comparing the target DPI rather than talking about how many icons fit in a 1024 pixel row. The 90s were a time when the idea screens should have an effective DPI of > 72 was new. Nowadays we have finished the migration to the effective 96 as the standard DPI. To view an image from a time the effective DPI was supposed to be 72 on a modern screen you need to scale it ~1.33x larger so that you're back to having an effective 96 pixels per inch image to output (for the exact same reason you say you need to scale the 4k to appear the same when it's a 15" output, just from the other direction).
> In the Win98 days UI was designed for precision mouse movements not trackpads and touchscreens. That’s ultimately what changed Office’s approach, and people using high precision mice just get the short end of the stick here. > > But web UI’s have taken this to an even worse extreme seemingly ramping up white space without considering why it was initially shifted.
Well it's not a very short stick considering the button comparison image didn't even correct for the above scaling :p. Web does have massive whitespace, but not because design really changed. E.g. here is a side-by-side of YouTube now and YouTube 2006: https://i.imgur.com/tYm0OoU.png and honestly whitespace has decreased with the content filling in those blanks in the "traditional" design. "But wait!" you say "When I look at YouTube I see massive swaths of blank space e.g. on the sides!" and well, sure, you do in some pages https://i.imgur.com/RfzXTeK.png but it's massively less than the legacy design's side whitespace https://i.imgur.com/mDjPFuB.png. The difference here is not that the web started shooting in massive amounts of whitespace into archived YouTube pages it's that the legacy design got to assume most viewers have a small 4:3 monitor and everything will need to fit in that small box whereas nowadays we have big 16:9 monitors but expanding the design to use all of that extra space only goes so far (but still farther in the "use less whitespace" design direction than the "use more"). YouTube also has new designs for certain situations that make it so any screen of any dimension has minimal whitespace usage: https://i.imgur.com/kHBH8Vk.png (vs a linear column list in the legacy design). Despite this people still blame the new YouTube design as having added new whitespace vs the old design.
Consider the modern version of YouTube in terms of separate clickable elements rather than the space between images / giant buttons and it’s mostly whitespace. So from that perspective modern YouTube has 4x the whitespace as the 2006 page even if it’s not as obvious.
This directly shows up in how few buttons you see from left to right when there are buttons and the amount of dead space around the up and downvotes etc.
If things are redesigned in an attempt to influence user behavior, then they aren’t primarily UI redesigns at all, they are engagement redesigns, and will generally be received poorly.
Opinion about UX changes will depend on who benefits from the changes. It is rarely the user who benefits anymore. That’s all that changed. UX people are not there to improve the experience for users; they are there to design ways to trick users into giving a website the secondary commodity all large companies want after money: attention. Companies are attention farms, now. Attention farms with stockholders.
The app model is so backwards the user has no control other than what the author intended.
I block reels, comments, and other click-bait garbage from YouTube.
Didn’t notice the redesign.
I wonder how is that possibile that third party clients are often better than first party from multibilion dollar corporations.
Btw I know that my days of using third party clients are numbered.
Did they unfreeze this journalist from 1999 or something? Feedback from users has been irrelevant for decades already.
The change that has people upset isn't border radius. Rather than having the comments below the video and suggestions on the right, the suggested other videos are now below the video you are watching, and the comments are in the narrow slot on the right side of the screen, making it more difficult to read/scan comments.
My guess is by giving suggested other videos the prime real estate, it will cause the user to watch more videos and thus more ads. Reading and creating comments doesn't directly generate revenue. This could backfire because people who enjoy reading/writing comments may come back less frequently or stay less time because they enjoy the site less. It feels less like an ad hoc community and more of what it really is: an ad delivery service.
As someone who pays for ad-free youtube, I resent that not only do I still need to sit through or navigate through in-video ads, but now I find the experience of reading other people's comments and sharing my own more difficult.