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YouTube says goodbye to decade-old video player UI, but users hate the new design
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pipepipe
this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2025
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Havent seen it, I know I'll hate it. I have never seen a UI redesign by any company that was actually good. Maybe once, but couldn't remember them for the life of me.
Youtube has had multiple redesigns over its lifespan, and I'll bet you probably do prefer the last one over their original 2005 UI.
I want the snake game on the loading screen back :(
Absolutely. A particular bugbear of mine is the "Continue as $username on $TV?" drag-up panel at the bottom when it detects another TV on the same network.
No YouTube, I'd have clicked that big fuckoff cast button in the top right if I wanted people to see my Celine Dion addiction in sixty diagonal inches. Worse still, you have to swipe away the panel before clicking on any other link or tappable object in view.
It's not just the once either. Fuck off.
e: and another thing, fuck your shorts too. I'll watch them when I actually want (and bear with me here) short form content, not crowbarred into my search results like an algorithmic equivalent of someone wearing a white dress at someone else's wedding. Fuck all the way off.
Truth. Shorts can get fucked
I'd rather they just set up shorts as a separate section and make it easily toggleable. Including those in search is fine... but the search should make it easy to switch back and forth between including those results along with regular content, only shorts, or only regular videos. Especially on desktop where you have the room for a more complex UI.
Short form content has a place, and I'd rather watch that shit on YouTube where I already have an account instead of having to go to Tik Tok or Instagram and deal with China or Facebook the times I do want to doom scroll it. There are some great short form only creators.
Block the shorts, I've not seen one in over 6 months now.
You can't block the shorts, you can only tell them you are not intrested and they will come right back. As soon as I see them in my feed I always immediately click the 3 dot menu and not interested button and it'll tell me it'll suggest Shorts less frequently but I'll see it again within a day or so if not again later in the same session of watching stuff. They are 100% shoving it down peoples throats and do not listen to user feedback on this. Hell I just went and checked my review in the app store from 2023 and I was complaining about the shorts reapearing immediately back then with no way of blocking them along with the app wanting to sign into any tv on the network that has the YouTube tv app. I literally can't use the mobile app between shorts being shoved into my face and the app wanting to connect to someone elses tv ever time you open the app.
Especially Google
iOS comes to my mind (The old one was fun too tho)
iOS wasnt an original design, it was stolen from Creative Labs.
Elaborate please
This sounds mega interesting. My (admittedly shite) attempts at googling it return results on the Apple App Store
Would you be so kind as to elaborate with some further reading? I haven't got a rabbit hole to dive in to tonight yet 😊
Stolen or Not it still counts as redesign, no?
No, Apple pays Creative Labs for every apple product sold.
I don't really like it, but I can see it being helpful for some people with vision issues. Or more likely toddlers navigating a tablet, the real demographic prize for ad clicks.
I wouldn't really care, if could just keep those stupid tablet changes away from desktop...
When I'm in fullscreen, I don't want to scroll down to the description/suggestions if I click the navigation bar.
I don't need giant thumbnails.
I don't want voice search.
etc.
Honestly, the new design fixes the one thing that's bothered me about the old player for years, which is the shading it applies to the bottom portion of the video when the UI is open. If I want to pause to read some text at the bottom of the video, I'm just out of luck because it's basically blacked out the bottom of the screen for no discernible reason. This new UI is a lot cleaner in that regard.
Never before have YouTube users hated a new (worse) design
My beef with this new design is that it needlessly takes up more space. It's comical when the video is small; the scroll bar can be near the middle of the video sometimes. And on top of this it feels slower and less responsive.
I watched a letterboxed video earlier and it cropped the black bars and made my video a little narrow strip at the top left. I thought I was losing it then it started beachballing in an attempt to keep up with it's own micromanagement horseshit rather than, you know, playing a video.
They made an artistic decision on content they don't create, just host.
It's fucking goofy.
Users always hate when you change anything in established UIs so this doesn't really tell you that much qualitatively about the UI itself.
You have to wait for a while for sentiments to settle before people actually figure stuff out. Until then, you just kind of have to rely on your UX skills to evaluate the UI (and monitor metrics of course)
Idk about this new design, but I have noticed you can't select an option to never show a channel again anymore. That's some major bullshit.
I REALLY LOVE how the fucking notification tab in Firefox on my computer doesn’t show who fuckin actually made the goddamn video now, you hafta know by the icon. They’d really fucking sweet. Also it still has “Uploaded:” and that’s serially still necessary. Good and cool, you shit rubbish platform that keeps sucking more every day.
Increase Padding!
Looks like it's designed for Youtube's movie and shows offerings, given the prominent "jump to next segment" button. Always ironic how far away from "broadcast yourself" we have gotten.
Overall, I don't hate it.
Honestly in my opinion it doesn't look too bad but I would lessen the margins a little and also fix the audio slider.
On first glance I think it looks nice. It's just a little sharper and more of a modern style choice.
Users reporting issues with the volume scroller have a point and hopefully that's addressed. I do dislike when features are removed because the only aim is to be "simpler"