YouTube To Roll Out New Design Today
Posted by: garbage on Mar 31, 2010
Did you know that today March 31st, 2010 Youtube is getting a brand new redesign?
Below are some highlights of some of the things that have changed and why.
Streamlined look and functionality -- the video is the star: This concept is at the heart of the redesign. YouTube is about creating and watching the world's biggest video collection; therefore, the design should make the video the star. To that end, the new look is more subdued, stripped down and simple than before. The design should help ease users into advanced features, while providing power users with all the functionality they want.
New "next up" video list: We'll be smarter about queuing up other videos for you to watch on the right side of the page that will take into consideration how you found a video. For example, if you arrived at a video through Search, the rest of the search results will follow you to the playback page so your can continue to browse search results on the video page. The same goes for playlists and recommendations; if that's how you found a video, then that's what will show up on the right side of the page. Again, this is about creating a consistent viewing experience -- and a relevant one when we include context about your viewing intentions.
Description and stats areas united: More specific information about the video you're watching is now in one place on the page: underneath the video. Click on the "Description" snippet or the Views to see more. This new expand capability works on multiple elements of the page so you won't have to learn a new trick to view each piece of data. The result: less clutter, especially on the right side where you look for the next video to watch.
Cleaned up actions bar: Actions like sharing, rating, saving or flagging a video are now all grouped in one place, with a cleaner, simpler "button bar." We thought a lot about practicality here, choosing to expose only the most commonly used actions and language for you. And, "Playlists" can now be built via the "Save to" pulldown menu.
Simplified binary ratings: As we noted in an earlier blog post, the rating system on YouTube doesn't really work that well (e.g. only the 1 and 5 star ratings were ever really used). So we moved towards a simpler "Like / Don't Like" model. Liking a video will also save it to your Favorites to make it easy to find those videos again.
New player sizing and video quality controls: We're adding a new size control into the player that allows you to pick a larger size to watch your video (formally above the player). When you pick the size, we'll serve you the ideal quality. For those of you hungry for more control, you can pick the specific video quality (for example, SD, HD or 1080p) in an associated drop-down menu. We'll warn you when we think there may be a better quality choice, but the control is in your hands.
Search results within the page: Now you can now search while you're watching a video and results will appear on the right side of the video page, without interrupting the viewing experience.
More prominent channel/subscriber placement and a new "see more videos" feature: Subscriptions are important to many of you, so we've made it more noticeable by moving the "Subscribe" button to the top of the video right near the title. This also gives anyone the ability to quickly peek at more videos from the creator's channel. (Just click on the arrow next to the number of uploads on the person's channel to see more videos from that user.) You've told us that making you hunt for this information on the page is confusing and many of you wanted this data in one place. This should make it easier to discover more content from videographers you like.
Can't wait for the redesign? You can manually opt-in to the changes by clicking this link.
Twitter Redesign
Posted by: Admin on Jul 29, 2009
Twitter has redesigned their homepage with slick new graphics and a prominent placement for search and top tags. Is this just a beginning of a complete redesign or not?
Update from twitter blog:
Today we're trying a redesigned front page for folks who are new to Twitter.com. If you're a regular around these parts, then you won't notice the new look unless you sign out of your account. Helping people access Twitter in more relevant and useful ways upon first introduction lowers the barrier to accessing the value Twitter has to offer and presents the service more consistently with how it has evolved.
Read more
Yahoo’s All New Home Page is awful
Posted by: garbage on Mar 16, 2009
The new page combines what Yahoo calls “broadcasting†elements, which are the same news and resource links for everyone, with “narrowcasting,†which are highly customized home pages made popular by My Yahoo, iGoogle, Netvibes and others.
Is it just me or do we all think that Yahoo is making a big mistake with this approach. Not to mention that the design is a little ridiculous. What's with the purple logo?