I mean YouTube UI is a disgrace really, what is it about big companies that stop them from being able to do design properly (even Apple post Jobs is starting to experience this).
- There are these weirdly looking fixed (Googleish) bars for no other reason than to steal my screen space.
- Recommendations are mostly awful (10 things that will shock you!) or videos I have already watched.
- The subscription to a whole channel is a dumb concept. I usually care only about specific series of videos, not the whole channel. Example: New movie reviews, not the bullshit rambling filler videos. The effect is that I often unsubscribe from the whole channel even though there is some interesting content.
- The video controls cover part of the video for no apparent reason.
- The volume control slider disappears for no reason when you move the cursor away from it.
- There are wrong defaults like showing annotations or autoplay.
- Annotations are abused so much that you cannot leave them enabled.
- Obvious missing feature: Next/previous buttons for videos that belong to a series. Playlists are used as a bad workaround.
- I can only use YouTube on my Desktops because that's where the ad blocker works.
- Obvious missing feature: Donations to content creators.
I don't think this is a big company problem. It is a culture problem. When your boss has no taste and does not take criticism very well, you end up with wrecks like Twitter, Google+ or YouTube.
Yup, it's amazingly bad. 'Related' videos are mostly OK, but reccomendations seem to be just a 'related' video based on something you watched ages ago. I guess most youtube viewers are browsing omnivores and don't really care how bad the stuff is as long as it makes the time pass.
At least Amazon let you fix their reccomendations.
> At least Amazon let you fix their reccomendations
You can on youtube as well. From the homepage, mouse over a recommended video and the three vertical dots appear. From there you can say "Not interested" and provide a reason.
That makes a difference, if at all, in only one direction. Amazon at least used to let you specify "I own it" for books that you own but didn't buy through them, which greatly improves their book reccomendations.
Amazon will also show you "I'm reccomending X because you bought Y", and let you say "don't use Y to reccomend me things". Youtube doesn't.
And the three dots don't appear for the one reccomended video that lurks among the related videos on the right of a video you're watching.
1. The interface is complex and defined because of the sheer amount of features present.
2. Recommendations work really well after for me after I started using the "not interested" feature and curating channels.
3. You can add playlist and get notified when new videos are added easily - thus eliminating the need to subscribe to whole channels if you don't like all their content. (I know there are a few I like to see all the content from).
4. They disappear when you mouse away.
5. The volume control slider works...
6. Annotations are not default on for me. Autoplay on by default got me to start using it and is great for Chromecast and music.
7. Annotations can be updated by uploaders and some are good - but the default engine is only sufficient and sometimes difficult to translate. (But still the best I've seen anywhere else on the web for non-intentionally edited ones)
7. I don't see playlists as a bad workaround for this- particularly given you can update them in real time. Also the queue for streaming has this feature. (It would be cool to have the ability to navigate search while playing videos).
8. You just became a cost center for Youtube rather than a cost and revenue center - and your needs won't be catered to. YouTube Red is great and comes with a music subscription service and solves the ad problem.
9. This is a good idea. The workaround currently is Patreon links in the description which add minimal total clicks to donating.
I don't know how the Youtube Team operates but I'm very thankful for their product. They serve up incredible amounts of video on dozens of devices and network types for many use cases and manage to do so in a way that perseveres some discoverability and personalization. Red allows ad free access to insane amounts of content for a reasonable cost.
Thanks for being the man in the arena YouTube team.
1. Complex can be good, that's not the point, it's a disorganised UI
2. I think the "you need special knowledge" to use an interface rather proves the point right?
3. Again seems like bad UI if that grand parent found this very difficult.
4-7. Sure, you have come up with YouTube workarounds.
8. YouTube ads are a necessary evil I guess.
9. Sure.
The man in the arena is about a couple of guys in their basement daring greatly, not a multi billion dollar company! It's ridiculous to conflate the two things.
> - Recommendations are mostly awful (10 things that will shock you!) or videos I have already watched.
if you're not logged in (personally I only log into gmail in a private tab), you just get the related videos, which are (imho) fine.
if you're logged in, yeah. useless.
> - I can only use YouTube on my Desktops because that's where the ad blocker works.
Firefox for Android has extensions, among which uBlock Origin, which blocks the youtube ads.
I also have some thingy to block the ads in the Youtube app but that's an Xposed-mod, which requires a rooted device (if yours is rooted, Xposed is highly recommended, many useful mods for many apps)
Also, shortcuts that work without focussing the video. Press space to pause the video, it scrolls down instead. So you learn about "k" which pauses without focus, great. Then you want to skip forward/backward with the arrow keys. Again, doesn't work without focus...
afaik you can export and download json with your YT history as part of 'everything Google spied on me' thanks to EU privacy recommendation/directive/law
They really are. On desktop they're unskippable (unless you reload - often 10+ times to get something short enough or no ad), they're never relevant or interesting, they're ridiculously long (often over a minute, I've seen them significantly longer than the video). They're noise, and the signal/noise ratio is worse than I've ever seen on TV. If a video's longer than about 10 minutes sometimes it cuts in the middle of a sentence to show another irrelevant, long, rubbish ad too.
I think one of the more frustrating issues with advertisements is with the overlay ads as opposed to the pre-play ads. While the pre-play ads cause the same frustrations that TV/radio ads do (obnoxiously loud compared to the content you mean to watch, often irrelevant even when you allow all advertising trackers to run), the overlay ads are exceptionally frustrating because they often obfuscate content. Instructional videos or videos involving subtitles are particularly victimized by overlay ads since it's not just a mild interruption at that point, the ads often are completely blocking important content in the video.
Truthfully, with all of the great minds that are at google, it's a bit shocking they haven't found a way to make the advertisements at least a bit more amicable to their viewing audience. In my mind, there's no reason that some sort of content analysis couldn't be done during the upload to check the overlay boundaries and see if "crucial content" like text is present, and set flags in the meta-data so that the ad software can avoid those time stamps. Or on the sound issue, do some advertisement audio balancing based on the volume of the previous and following video so you don't suddenly get audio blasting through speakers/headphones.
To me these seem like relatively simple user experience tweaks that really would make it easier to digest advertising through the service.
Consequently, using Safari on mac and click-to-plugin, you can force an HTML5 player, which seems to not allow the pre-play ads or the overlay ads at all. I've found the experience much more enjoyable via this method.
Maybe that's what it was. I usually stick to Safari when I can, and I used uBlock because it doesn't have uBlock origin. That blocked everything except video ads, which if they should have been skippable it could have been making them unskippable. I switched to Wipr that uses the content blocker API and that removes the video ads too.
The unskippable ads are only 30 seconds, and they only show up sometimes (for me, about 1/3 to 1/2 the time an ad shows up, and like 2/3 the time the ad is a 5 second skipable ad.).
Honestly, the ads are easily the worst part of youtube for me. I'm logged into my google account, everywhere, all the time. And yet they still appear to go out of their way to find the least relevant ads they can find. Adsense doesn't seem to suffer the same, so this disconnect has always puzzled me.
I have had a 4 minute long song in a style of music I NEVER listen to as a YT ad before. I'm not going to listen to some 2nd rate rock moaner for 4 minutes between every 4 minute long weeaboo track I'm trying to listen to.
I get bombarded with so many Lyft ads on my android device. Every other video I play is preceded by a Lyft ad. I finally caved in, downloaded the app and signed up for it. Their ads still haven't stopped.
What really gets me, is a lot of the ads I’ve been getting are stuff 50yo “ad tech” would get right. Lately I’ve been getting a womens' clothing brand which appears to only exist in north america. I’m a male in northern europe. A print ad in a national newspaper would do a better job “targetting” than that.
Probably because it becomes design by committee at a certain point, and some functionality interrupts or excludes other design intents by nature.
For example, in the linked extension, it overlays (replaces?) the youtube recommended videos once you submit a search query - as part of the recommendation stuff seems to be driving high-traffic related vids to the viewer, many of which are ad-monetized, this has a marginal impact on some revenue figures. How much I wouldn't dare make a guess at, but I do not feel it's hard to imagine wanting to keep that space operating "as is" for Youtube's benefit.
Other bad UI changes probably stem just from apathy, a decision having been made somewhere when no one considered a better alternative, and the change would be considered too much work for whatever reason.
These aren't necessarily satisfactory answers as to why bad design sneaks through, but they are answers.
It looks like all your comments since your very first one have been pretty reasonable. Not sure if this is something that can be fixed, so you may want to consider creating a new account?
Remember that you can visit a [dead] comment and click the vouch link to vote for it to be revived or possibly for the user's status to be reviewed. @dang can probably clarify; I can't remember the specifics.
I agree - design by committee is probably the culprit.
Generally, when one (or a couple) experienced designers get their hands on a UI, it turns out alright. Its the 'mish-mash' effect where multiple people try to control the look and feel, where things go south.
This can be because of a literal committee, but it can also be due to poorly designed software trying to take away design decisions from the designer.
Just take a look at the mess CSS made of things in the browser. For years, it was easier to design something that looked good by just hard-coding an interface in a native language...
What's wrong with it, exactly? The video player gives me fewer problems than other players, and the site as a whole seems to have everything needed to watch videos.
Aside from there being bugs, like videos not appearing in your subscriptions page, missing thumbnails, video (you just hear the audio of it) continuing to play in the background while you can browse the site normally?
One option I'm missing is as simple as reversing playlists (often they are in counter-chronological order when they shouldn't be) or that I can't order the subscribed channels on the left panel manually (I have so many subscriptions, that I have to get to the subscriptions manager, scroll all the way down and go to the second page to find some of my favorite channels) or infinite scroll which makes the viewport jump around when using the back button jump around and generally feels slow and clunky (although YT's implementation is not the worst out there at least.)
The player itself is quite nice here on Chromium (not HW-accelerated but that's a longstanding Chromium/Intel bug), I agree. Otherwise the site is relatively fast and reliable; I like especially the video streaming smoothness and automatic quality detection, which is lightyears ahead of anything I have seen elsewhere.
I don't have issues with the page design like the grand-parent does, but I'd like a way to make the video go "full window" in addition to "full screen" (yes I can fake this to some extent).
They ought to have a clear indicator of thumbs up/down ratio on each video thumbnail (a couple pixel bar at the bottom colored green/red would easily do the trick). That would save plenty of time that would otherwise be spent watching some troll video or annoying commentary/reaction edit of some other person's work.
It's the result when pendulum swung from Google being out of place regarding design to madness of designers running the show (whitespaces, huge fonts, images on a desktop intended website).
It's engineered to cater the most average Internet user. A drone. Stick out of the average with your wishes and you're out of luck.
The first thing I think of when I think of places YouTube's UI could be improved would be to simply allow logging in without bringing you to a completely separate screen (the generic Google login screen), which interrupts the content you were viewing.
That is probably made on porpuse because of their view on user experience is based on "clicking videos". So they want you to click from video to video rather than search your stuff directly.
It becomes incredibly difficult to fit new features into an interface that everybody knows without changing it and when you change something like this you alienate and non-power users which makes them watch less which means less advertising.
What he's referring to is subjective for sure, but for example, the Google Search page has lost a lot of UI-options for selecting different search limitations over the past few years.
One of the least subjectively dumb decisions that they pushed through, was to change the "+"-operator from making a word obligatory to searching for this word on Google+.
This one, I suppose, would go under just straight-up arrogance.
In general, though, I would ascribe it to bigger companies having a higher percentage of graphics designers, as opposed to regular programmers working on the UI.
And well, programmers will generally put more options and things into a UI than your average UI person.
And if you like options and things, then the UI person's UI is subjectively worse.
The Android app isn't very good, especially with regards to commenting: notifications sometimes don't come through, the layout is inflexible, and it isn't possible to edit or vote on comments.
One possible reason: think of the groups that formed on Facebook each time they changed the design, they didn't have any impact but they still existed that part of users.
