Slashdot Mirror
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.
Click your name/icon in the top right. At the bottom you'll find an option to "Restore Classic YouTube". This has the added advantage of giving you a chance to tell them why you don't like the new design.
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.
This space intentionally left blank
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.