YouTube has announced that it has redesigned its homepage, and the new design is going live imminently. The hugely popular video site intends to give more space to videos and titles on the front page, while also incorporating other new features.

Add to Queue

One of the major changes to the homepage will be the addition of an “Add to Queue” option on the desktop. This is obviously intended to make it easier for YouTube users to create their own playlists. A button will be added to the video thumbnail in order to make this more straightforward.

Google detailed that the aesthetic changes to the homepage will quite simply result in everything getting bigger. Several rows of content will be removed, in order to ensure that thumbnails on the front page of the video site are significantly larger and clearer that is the case currently.

YouTube recently introduced video previews, which are triggered when users hovers over a thumbnail with their cursor, and the rejigging of the YouTube design will also see these videos improved in quality. It is notable that some users have suggested that this feature is a little lacking in flexibility, so it will be interesting to see what Google comes up with, and whether there are any customization options evident.

Desktop and tablet

Google has confirmed that the design changes will impact on the desktop and tablet versions of YouTube, and that there are no immediate plans to roll them out to either the mobile website or app. However, it will be interesting to see whether Google has any plans in this the area in the foreseeable future.

Recent iterations of Google products has seen the mega-corporation tweaking text and imagery, intended to make the content itself more prominent. And as YouTube is a site that has long since sold itself, as well as being hugely familiar to probably billions of people worldwide, Google might believe that less instruction and more video clarity is important at this time.

Certainly this seems to be the idea of the redesigning of videos on the homepage, as longer video titles will now be allowed, while clearer thumbnails will make it much easier for users to understand precisely what a video is about.

In terms of the “Add to queue” option, this feature will make it easier to create ad hoc playlists, without doing away with the more feature-packed playlists that are a major aspect of the website. It is also interesting that Google will migrate the ‘stop suggesting’ feature that has proved popular on mobile, which enables users to prevent the YouTube algorithms from suggesting recommended channels.

Slicker experience

In their totality, the changes are focused on ensuring that YouTube is a slicker and less intrusive experience. This seems entirely sensible at a time when the website has built an absolutely fantastic global audience, and much of this audience is both very demanding, and already understands what it wants.

This redesign of YouTube comes at a time when the multi-million dollar KSI-Logan Paul boxing rematch succinctly underlines the popularity of the platform.