YouTube's new layout

[MusicallyInspired]

I hate it. I used to be able to view my subscriptions on the front page categorized by uploader. Now it's jumbled up by organizing solely by the latest video uploaded, which means all the uploaders are in a confusing mess. And there's no way to customize it. Also, they used to go horizontally across the screen and now they just list them one by one and you have to scroll ALLLLLL the way down to see them all. Horrible setup. I hear they were trying to copy a more TV-like format or something.

I think it sucks.

[DawsonJ]

Yeah, my YouTube Android app is mixing up the videos by new release, too. I don't know if that's what they're doing with all their modes of access, but it's kind of strange.

The YouTube app I'm using is old now, though, because all of the updates are glitch-laden - which they're continually ruining, too!

[wilco64256]

Oh my word I didn't know about this until I saw your thread so I went over to check it out.  It's just awful.  I just plain hate it, period.  What exactly did they think was so wrong with the old setup?  Seriously, if it's not broken don't fix it.

[Delling]

I think it sucks.

Seconded.


Google is also doing this ridiculous "new format" thing.

[drusain]

It's really ugly. I know why they did it and that's to give more ad space and to mimic Facebook and incorporate G+ (great, now everyone on my G+ knows I have videos..), the UI change is atrocious. Here's a comment that discusses it better than I:

Despite the overwhelming majority of devices being in a widescreen format, or the fact that the mass majority of their videos are in a widescreen format, the site is formatted to be read in a vertical fashion with such a bizarre aspect ratio.

On top of that, they have so much whitespace that quite obviously is there only for the sake of future full-screen advertisement backgrounds.

Forced integration of G+ and Facebook is dumb, and the subscription list on the left is a good idea, executed horribly.
The whole left bar is just clunky and redundant. The whole thing.

Videos from multiple subscribers are displayed in a nonsensible and non-customizable fashion. It doesn't make sense at all; previously, all videos from a given subscriber would at least attempt to be shown under the same headings.

Then there's the large recommended bar, which you also can't get rid of. It reeks of trying to force you to see content you don't care about so they can make money.

Next, you can't actually remove a video from the main subscriber column.
I...that's just totally broken functionality. They've outright removed a critical feature. Since they removed the "watch the video and it is removed from the list" functionality/preference around 2 updates ago, there is no way to get rid of a video you've watched. How was that not caught in testing?

Then there's the fact that you still can't search through your uploads/favorites/subscription videos. A simple text search, which they had implemented fine quite long ago (and removed, for some bipolar, developer-having-a-fit driven reason) is still not present again.

Then, more removed functionality - the ability to switch videos in a Channel without reloading the site - i.e. by scrolling through the subscriber video bar on the right. It would load in the same player before - a great feature - and they just cut the whole thing out for no real reason.

And there's also the broken sorting. I really don't understand why their sort by Date still does not work on anything but the main search. It's been broken since 2008 and it a broken single select query shouldn't take more than 10 seconds to fix on their end.

It seems like the entire site was designed by committee, as change for the sake of change. It seems like a desperate "me-too" following in the footsteps of the horrendous Gawker Media design update. A horrible attempt to make a tablet-oriented site that doesn't even work well in tablets.

The funniest part is that the m.youtube.com works better on all platforms than the main site. It scales to your window/browser's resolution and properly lists and delists content. Realistically, this design should have been filed under a new subdomain, like tablets.youtube.com, instead of foisted upon the main userbase.

Honestly, columnar display of the content isn't a bad idea. But the lack of video grouping, or rather any real sense of organization, and the massive amount of unused space are indicative of a terrible, terrible design strategy and ideology that the YouTube group have been espousing for a while.

Changing a UI is fine, even if it's a bit unintuitive. People will get used to that. But they've stripped or destroyed or obfuscated actual important features while not fixing the simple ones that have been long-requested for years now.

If anything, it seems like YouTube has adopted the "Mark Shuttleworth" style of design and farking over the user, and that's quite sad.

[Enchantermon]

I used to be able to view my subscriptions on the front page categorized by uploader. Now it's jumbled up by organizing solely by the latest video uploaded, which means all the uploaders are in a confusing mess.

Maybe I'm missing something, but you can view them by uploader by clicking on the buttons in the subscriptions bar on the left. You can only view one at a time this way, but it's better than nothing.

That being said, I agree, I don't think I like the new look either. But I only just saw it last night, so I haven't gotten to really work with it yet.

[MusicallyInspired]

I don't want to have to click anything. I discovered this, though. It takes you to the original layout. Change your bookmarks:

http://youtube.com/home

Don't know how long it'll last, though.

[DawsonJ]

Maybe I was too tired, but last night it took me 5 minutes just to figure out the new format for Playlists.

[Enchantermon]

http://youtube.com/home

Ah, cool. Thanks.

[Lambonius]

Guys!  For the last time!  Skyrim's new user interface isn't THAT bad!  On consoles, at least, it works much better in practice than Oblivion's did, in my opinion.

Oh wait.

[MusicallyInspired]

They've discovered that the link I posted brings you to the old version so they fixed it. However, another user had the ingenuity to discover another link that takes you back to the old format.

http://www.youtube.com/index_ajax

It gives a strange authorization error at the top, but otherwise works fine.

(Posted on: December 05, 2011, 08:51:56 PM)

New link is disabled.

[The Hero]

http://www.youtube.com/ appears to be back to the old layout

[MusicallyInspired]

In your mind, maybe.

[The Hero]

 it was yesterday god why cabt thungs stay the same?

[Sslaxx]

The Google+ integration is something I'm not massively unhappy with; I'd rather see tighter integration between all of Google's services. That said, the new look Google is rolling out is pretty atrocious; Google Mail has become much less useful for me, and less functional, and YouTube is just plain ugh.