Thursday, April 10, 2008

User Interface Updates at YouTube

YouTube updated the design of its video watch pages by adding tabs for actions and showing statistics in a new container. The "Favorite" tab is the only one connected to an immediate action and it should be removed, while the favorite videos could be generated based on ratings. Hunter Walk, product manager at YouTube, says that the sharing options "are now contextual to the logged in user, so for example, if you use Digg a lot but not Facebook, Digg will be elevated to a persistent top-level display instead of Facebook".

The search results page has also been updated and the option to sort results by popularity is back. To restrict your search to one or more categories or to a certain language, check the new advanced search.

YouTube's personalized homepage lets you reorder the sections so you can place the featured videos at the top, but it's still less usable than the classic YouTube homepage.