Okay Geek Farm
Youtube Video Page Redesign - Overview
Brandon Davenport
Youtube has been known in the past to mess stuff up, really bad, along with everybody else like Facebook, Digg and us T3ch H3lp, but sometimes stuff just turns out ok. Look at it this way, they took one of the most bland, flavorless and washed out website styles and flipped it all around. They threw in some actual elements that make sense like a new rating system, commenting system, searching tools and much more. While the guys and girls over at Youtube are taking a breather, lets look at some of the coolest stuff that changed.
Overall Look and Feel
This is the most obvious change because there is a whole new look and feel when you watch videos, comment, like, dislike and share them and it really turns the focal point to videos and letting people explore easier.
It has been cleaned up, and given an Apple-ish feel with the use of CSS3 styles and soft white and pearl colors with red, yellow and blue accents. They really do a good job of making it easy to pick out different things, like a comment your looking for or in-depth statistics on any video. They take the basic elements and use them to display vital info, thus giving you the ability to "expand" or "roll them down" and giving more space for other stuff like comments, descriptions and control elements.
Rating, Sharing and Commenting
This has all been re-worked, but the one thing that sticks out is the new rating system. In place of those evil red stars, there are now "Like" and "Dislike" buttons which borrows from Vimeo's and Facebook's rating system, but gives you the option to Dislike a video as well.
I like it because this will force people not to rate it on impulse, or based on the current rating, which used to give poor ratings to some really good videos. Now it will be based on one of two options, which will (overall) give a better, easier to understand method of judging a video.
The commenting system has been updated, and its much better =) Now you don't have to do a "barrel scroll" down to the bottom of the page to leave your snarky comment, its right below the video. We can expect to see more comments on videos because it is visible without scrolling. Also the "submit comment" button is gone, so now just treat it like a chat window.
Sharing has been improved also, allowing you to send your nutshot video to friends on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and others, along with being able to easily save it to a playlist. Also the Subscribe button has been moved to the top, and is no longer the iconic golden yellow.
Exploring and Searching
When you reach the end of this clip of The Office, and you are ready to move on to better things, you can search like you normally do but you'll notice that the search results no longer interrupt your video, so you can continue looking long and hard (thats what she said) for your next video to watch.
The "related videos" bar has been pushed all the way to the top of the right hand side, allowing for comments to be stuck underneath the actual video, which is nice but how do I see the whole.. Whoa! It folds up and down! Yes, your comments now fly up and down, along with related searches and Embedding the video, which is the same, but better (if you know what I mean).
Conclusion
I have begun to lose my love for Youtube, but it has been rekindled because of effort, content and the ever continuing journey for the perfect website, and they are getting so close, I can almost be jealous. Over the years, Youtube has gone through many changes, stages and triumphs, but I have a feeling this is just a little taste of what is coming next...
