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YouTube Finally Embraces Google's Material Design, Puts Focus On Content (googleblog.com)
Google's Material Design specs are finally coming to the YouTube desktop site, the company said on Tuesday. The feature isn't rolling out to all just yet, but you can test drive it here. My initial impressions after playing with the new design: lots and lots of white space, but the optional dark theme looks pretty. Here's how the company describes the changes: The key principles of this new design are:
1. Simplicity: The only thing you should be concerned about is watching the content you love. The new design is clean and fresh, thanks to the removal of visuals that can distract from your browsing or watching experience. We're focused on making the content shine!
2. Consistency: The new design is aligned across Google platforms, including the YouTube mobile app, while still providing the features you know and love.
3. Beauty: We strive to combine beauty and purpose to create an effortless experience.
1. Simplicity: The only thing you should be concerned about is watching the content you love. The new design is clean and fresh, thanks to the removal of visuals that can distract from your browsing or watching experience. We're focused on making the content shine!
2. Consistency: The new design is aligned across Google platforms, including the YouTube mobile app, while still providing the features you know and love.
3. Beauty: We strive to combine beauty and purpose to create an effortless experience.
Well, simplicity I'll grant, and maybe consistency.
But a clean miss on beauty. Flat is ugly. Always has been. Always will be. No matter what's "trendy."
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
Google's Material Design specs are finally coming to the YouTube desktop site, the company said on Tuesday. The feature isn't rolling out to all just yet, but you can test drive it here.
"Test drive" implies it's temporary. How do I get decent Youtube back? The "test drive" link is http://youtube.com/new?optin=t... but https://www.youtube.com/new?op... doesn't reverse it.
The only thing you should be concerned about is watching the content you love.
We have entered the era of the glorification of the consumer. All you should do is consume, and feel happy about it.
Not because they care about you. Because the consumer can be monetized.
Irresponsible disclosure is responsible
People will complain about anything. It's a site to share and watch video content, not design your apartment around.
Beware of the Leopard.
Usability? That's so 1990s.. Now it's all about aesthetics... ugly ass aesthetics.
I was never a fan of the infinite content scroll. It works well for Pinterest. But not so much for other content websites.
Got this for about 2 hours yesterday while I was editing some video and two things immediately struck me:
(This is all running Firefox with no-plugins on a Core i7 with 16 GB of memory)
1. Almost all the UI elements lagged, my suspicion is that content is loaded as needed. The comments section has been loading on demand for a while but now it seems to extend to other functions too now
2. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and I beheld none; smaller lighter fonts, less contrast, burying things under modal dialogs (seriously why is a popup necessary for sharing the URL?)
Speaking of modal dialogs some of the notifications now appear under the video layer (making it impossible to interact with)
Google has a habit of testing crap like this on a subset of us and waiting for annoyed responses to fill up the Google Product Forums, I haven't checked to see what's there today but my guess is other users experienced similar behavior (unless I just got lucky in which case "go me")
crazy dynamite monkey
More white space
= less words
= less content
= less thinking
= more scrolling until you actually find what you want.
I suppose Youtube's most profitable customers are unable to deal with a screen packed full of information, but I'd prefer not to waste my time scrolling until I find what I need.
Youtube has pretty much been on a downward trend in UI usability since Google purchased the site. Every time they decide to "update" the interface, it seems to keep on steam rolling back in time. This "content focused" approach has left little presented up front, forcing users to go through menus to find the other shit the site can do. 2006 Youtube might look dated, but usability was much better overall, as was stability as I recall. With this latest iteration, this leaves me feeling like I'm using Windows 2.0, next will probably move us back to Windows 1.0 like functionality and I can't wait until everything is done from a terminal, including watching the video in hex!
Damn good times ahead folks!
All I see is a page with a vertically scrolling frame on the left and window that's too wide on the right so the content is cropped on both sides. Are asshole designers just assuming everyone has a widescreen monitor?
FUCK. YOU.
#DeleteFacebook
Used to be websites had good desktop/laptop usability and poor phone/tablet usability. Now they have good phone/tablet usability and poor desktop/laptop usability.
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I don't like it!
Therefore no one likes it!
Therefore they should have spent time doing something completely unrelated that those same people would have no idea how to implement!
Given that the trend in the last 5-10 years has been to discard usability in favour of wannabe hipster wank (examples: Just about any UI ever in that time period that's had a "refresh" or something similar, Win10 probably being the poster child but there are endless other examples), I'm not holding out much hope for what a "UI refresh" will do to Youtube.