One thing I’ve noticed through the years is that redesigns and change can be difficult. Many online publishers spend a lot of time trying to improve their display of content. They have good intentions (nobody wants to alienate their users). Generally, it is better to take a successful site and make incremental adjustments as opposed to drastic changes. Or to stage the changes in small steps. Perhaps YouTube and Google stretched the redesign too far and didn’t keep enough of the core user experience. It’s a good lesson for anyone thinking about a redesign, that even a company like Google can garner significant negative feedback when straying too far from the current offering.

What I was trying to do with this post was highlight some of the ways YouTube is responding to want and need for social media interaction on its interface. Though YouTube has always been a social media site, I believe with these new features, it is even moreso.

Diora and Hurricoaster, you point out that the like/dislike system and comments are a mess. Though the star ratings did allow for more that just a yea/nay response, YouTube’s research showed that it was ineffective, as I pointed out in this post. From my observations, they are trying to find a way to make this rating system more usable. I know that I rarely rated videos before, but am now more apt to like or dislike something to see how everyone else “voted.” With this, I also see how they’re pulling in aspects of other social networks not to be like them, but to create a more common interface throughout. Perhaps someday the “likes” on YouTube will connect with Likes on Facebook, or something to that effect. This takes that one step closer.

I’m sure YouTube has heard everyone’s complaints, and will respond with more effective changes in the coming months. Google is good about that, and I believe YouTube will be no different.

1. There are no channel icons visible while you’re watching the video.
2. Channel comments are too small and are too close together.
3. You have to scroll over the comments just to see when they were made.
4. Add some color!
5. It’s extremely hard to tell who someone is replying to in the comments, because they’re not tied together. For example, in my comments page, some guy answered someone else, but I had no idea who he was talking to and what he was talking about. He just said “tourettes guy.” I couldn’t figure out why he said that.
6. Video responses – It’s really annoying how, in order to see all of the responses, we have to go onto another page, instead of staying on the same one and viewing them via scrollbar.
7- the most important of all – The rating system. There should be a middle ground. Here’s why. What if there’s a video that you think is just average? You can’t dislike or like it, because it’s just mediocre. There should be a middle button, one that you can click on if you think it’s so/so. You know, like a thumbs – sideways button. Or, just bring back the original star system, which everyone seems to like.

Apparently you are not listening to the blogs, forums and vids that people are posting. People hate the new changes. On one forum thread it was page three before anyone had anything good to say about the changes.
Are you being paid by Google to write this one sided article or are you just that out of touch?

Most users PREFER the 5-star system to simple like/dislike. I can listen to a song and think it’s good but not great, so I cannot give it thumbs up or down. The world is not black and white, it’s full of shades of gray but YouTube designers and people like you who DON’T CARE about what real users think. Maybe for some videos most users rate it as 5 stars, but this isn’t the case for many music videos where awful/mediocre/good/great are possible. What if it’s a duet and one singer is excellent and another is bad?

Also, the comments area in this new design is an AWFUL MESS! It’s no longer possible to see comments IN CONTEXT – something you clearly don’t understand. There is no threading, no indentation of multiple replies to the same post. There is simply no way at all to have a discussion because even if you use @person (and most people don’t), it’s still one person that may have had multiple posts (which one is being replied to?) maybe on a different page. What if in the meantime somebody else answered the first person’s question, but the reply was not correct. There is no grouping of relevant posts as there used to be, no indentation to show a thread, no way to view multiple related posts together. A 5-year old would come up with better design.

Are you getting paid by YouTube? Because all your post does is repeat their official line with no answer to numerous complaints.

The redesign has come in for widespread and furious criticism from an overwheleming majority of users on Youtube’s own blog, for its ‘cluttered and unintuitive’ design, particuarly the redeigned Comments section which has been roundly panned for lack of functionality or aesthetic. Whether right or wrong, these criticisms deserve a mention in any article on the subject.

The conspicuous absence of any such mention here causes this article to come off rather unfortunately looking like a re-worded Youtube press release.