YouTube

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.

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?