Friday, June 8, 2007

YouTube Partially Takes Back Interface Changes

A mere day after Google-owned YouTube rolled out the changes to their interface, they’re retracting one of the changes which received heavy criticism, as the gSpy blog notes: whenever you hovered over parts of the video, still thumbnails of related videos would overlay onto the video (and they wouldn’t disappear for some seconds). To quote from some of the negative comments that appeared on YouTube:

“Not very nice, very irritating, sorry.”

“This is horrible, really ruins my blog”

“Yuck!!! This new feature sucks! Hella distracting like everyone said!”

“PLEASE take this feature OFF!!!!!! very annoying and distracting!!!! i HATE it.”

YouTube has now changed it so that the related videos, as well as some other features, only appear when you click the “menu” button in the bottom left (have a look at some sample videos to see this in action). This actually works quite well, and while you got to wonder why YouTube rolled out the old thumbnails behavior in the first place – it was quite obvious that thumbnails could be triggered accidentally, and surprises are the enemy of usability – it’s good to see YouTube listen to feedback.

[Thanks Keith Chan of gSpy!]

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