Are the designers at YouTube on drugs?
Remember the simple and beautiful design of the very first YouTube player interface?
And when they updated it it took me ages to get used to it but I was sort of able to cope.
But now something happened overnight at the YouTube offices and they updated it to the ugly, ugly, ugly thing below. WTF? How could this happen? I’m seriously thinking about not posting any YouTube movies anymore.
UPDATE: MySpace just launched their video page and their player looks a lot better. In fact they might cause quite a bit of trouble for YouTube as they apparently drive 60% of its traffic and might as well keep that to themselves in the future.
YES!!! TRUE!!!
This is a really bad ‘upgrade’. Some Flash designers need to be slapped.
Actually… it’s a complete downgrade. They even *removed* the volume control and put the old ‘mute’ button back in.
Idiots.
mmh, I think they have the money to test the different interfaces, and I think they do test.
I guess from a usability point of wiev the newest one is the best one, the have now grown beyond their first audience ( tech savy ) and have to cope with the limitations of the simple user.
Which means:
- big simple elements are good
- ugly may be good if it’s big and simple
Your last picture is already obsolete. They have a volume control now, as well as a counter. But I agree: it is ugly and a step backward. It’s too big. The stop button should not be the same size as play/pause. Instead of a square for stop they use some sort of rewind icon or something. The moving circle overlaps the end of the playback track so you think you’re at the end when you’re not. The playback track is shorter, so you have less fine control. And, it’s red. Red! Which is a massive distraction. The red counter is hard to read. Why is it red, what a stupid choice. But those icons (that no one ever uses) animate when you hover over them! Ooooooo (sarcasm)
Ugly all around, but I especially hate the red. And why? Like anyone needs a huge bright red bar to tell them that the video they’re watching is progressing. It’s like the controls have become more important than the videos. So ugly I don’t think I can watch youtube anymore.
[...] Linky. (With beautifully illustrative before-after shots to drive home the suckage) [...]
It looks like something churned out by someone barely 2 weeks into Photoshop.
“OOH! FILTERS! BEVELS! GRADIENTS! COOL!”