YouTube Has a New Look on Mobile
Last week, YouTube began rolling out a new look across the web and its various apps, promising a “more expressive and intuitive interface.” In reality, reactions have been mixed. The TV app, for example, no longer automatically rewinds or forwards when you press Previous or Next, but instead navigates between buttons including “Like” or “Subscribe.” More than once, while on TV, I accidentally subscribed to a channel without meaning to, before realizing that I now have to tap first to get to the progress bar.
Now, the changes have reached the YouTube mobile app, as first spotted by 9to5Google. While they’re a little gentler than what you’ll see on TV, there are still some changes to get used to.
Bigger and bulkier icons
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt
By far the most notable new change is YouTube’s new suite of icons, all of which appear to have been hit with a “Ctrl+B.” Compared to the old look, the play, fast-forward and other buttons all look bigger and bolder, the idea being to make them more visible.
Some buttons have also been consolidated. When watching a video in landscape mode, buttons that don’t affect playback (like, dislike, comment, etc.) now appear all together in a pill in the lower left corner, rather than as separate items.
New animations
The new buttons aren’t the only change YouTube has in store for you. Searching for videos also now has a new animation, and on some videos, liking now comes with a bit of extra personality.
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt
The first is a fairly minor change. Now, when you double-tap the screen to move forward or back 10 seconds, the video automatically jumps to the new location and displays a large “-10” or “+10”, rather than showing a quick animation of three arrows disappearing into each other with a smaller “-10 seconds” or “+10 seconds” below them.
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt
The second one is a little cuter. On some videos, tapping the Like button will now launch a custom animation, rather than just putting a few sparkles around a thumbs-up. For example, on a music video, you’ll briefly see a musical note replace the thumbs-up.
Pausing no longer darkens your background
It used to be that pausing a video would darken the background until you unpaused it, much like dimming the lights on a stage. This is no longer the case. Although you will still see the lights dim slightly when the controls are open, a paused video will now display normally if you press again to close the controls. This is a small tweak, but one that might prove useful for taking screenshots. At the same time, though, I worry that it’s easy to think a video is frozen, if you’re not paying attention.
Finally, Google removed a few steps for saving and commenting on videos.
Now tapping the bookmark icon to save a video to a playlist has fewer steps and no longer requires you to navigate through multiple pages. Instead, it will simply pause the video and open a list of your playlists for you, where you can quickly tap the playlist you want to save your video to.
What do you think of it so far?
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt
Additionally, comments are now threaded, easily showing who is responding to which comment. It’s a great way to follow the flow of the conversation, even if each comment takes up a little more space.
Can you get rid of the new YouTube UI?
Ultimately, I’m a little torn about the new YouTube app. Some new features, like threaded comments, make sense to me. But the larger buttons seem to bother me a bit, and I can’t help but think of Fisher-Price when I see them.
Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do if you don’t like YouTube’s new mobile interface. It’s still rolling out, so you may not see all the changes yet. But since it’s server side, once it hits you, that’s it. Even the web player benefits from these changes, so leaving the app behind is not a viable option.
That said, if you’re using a desktop computer, users on Reddit and YouTube itself create lists of extensions that you can mix and match to personalize your experience. Technically, there are mobile browsers that will let you play with these as well, Firefox being the biggest these days. However, I found that most of the suggested extensions no longer worked for me or were not available on mobile.
In this case, if you’re tired of the way YouTube currently looks, you might want to consider another playback app instead, like Play. It still relies on embedded videos, so it won’t save you every change, but its overall minimalist style could offer a welcome relief from YouTube’s increasingly busy design language.
