UX

The article by Jayden Milne about YouTube’s change in videos on its frontpage and it’s current HN thread made me think about the times a good User Interface and User Experience is traded for profit. Reading the comments on HN, it looks like everyone is dissatisfied and annoyed by the way YouTube is changing over the years. Important things are shorts, bad recommendations, ads, and of course the work against ad blockers like ublock. Back in the days, YouTube was a content platform. Nowadays, YouTube’s number 1 goal is to sell advertisement spots and show them to as many people as possible. Obviously, there’s some kind of conflict of objectives. They want the user’s to stay on the site, watch their favorite YouTubers for many hours and at the same time deliver ads and recommend videos the user inwardly doesn’t want to watch. Let them watch what they want is not as lucrative as if they showed the most ad-suitable content. Showing and recommending more ad-suitable content might lose users and clicks over time. There’s the typical balancing between two worlds.

The statement

The more icons within an interface, the more difficult it can be to navigate.

is so true. With each icon it get’s more complex to understand what’s happening. Think about the Windows file dialog (right click on a file or desktop). Not every action has its own icon. Only a few primary actions have one to better differentiate between them. With In Defense of Text Labels Christopher Butler wrote a great article on Why icons are often irritating and labels are just better (most of the time). Go check it out.

I gave the new Google Maps redesign a try. It’s one of those let’s do something new just to do something new redesigns. I try to understand why they changed the back button to a misplaced x-icon.

Have a look at the image. The left image is the one that is a so-called detail view of a (public traffic) route. Previously there was a back button at the top left. Now there is a close button on to far right at the top of the bottom sheet . For me, a close button indicates to get back to the top most layer - in this case poping the whole navigation stack that lead from the general map view to this detailed route view. I’d expect the same behavior when closing the bottom sheet. Instead, a single navigation pop is performed getting me back to where I was before: the route overview (image in the middle). Since the route overview (image in the middle) is only one step away from the top navigation stack page, a click on the close icon in this case get’s you (correctly incorrectly) back to the map view without any selection. When you select a POI on the map (right image) you actually can navigate back via a back button. Why don’t you now use a close button instead?

YouTube applies the same layout concept for both its smartphone app and its tablet app. However, some best practices for the layout just do not apply to bigger devices. I think everyone knows this stretched layout:

You could improve this layout by adding some dividers:

This looks great! But wait. Have you tried this on a large (horizontal) 10" screen?

Now, it’s harder to select the correct value. Sometime I have to count the number of rows on both sides to know which row I should select. Maybe I need a ruler. And if you add the dividers.. ..you’ll see that the dividers do not really help in this case anymore. While moving your eyes from the left (the label) to the right (the action/value) you can so easily mess up the rows. When you look at the YouTube’s app search filter settings, you can see how bad this layout inside a real app. Can you only look at the values (right side of the image) and guess the correct row’s of the checkmarks?