New York — It comes as no surprise that Google owned popular video-sharing website YouTube is also one of the the second most popular search engine, faring after only Google in overall search queries. And kudos, YouTube today is rolling out a new, more sparse masthead that displays its search box front and center. With the redesign going live for all, users can now see the new interface that shows the site’s prominent “community” tab as well as its “QuickList” tool for saving videos.
YouTube has also blogged about the redesign, explaining some of the new features and a few that were removed.
Search is Google’s core empire, and it has become quite important on YouTube as well. With that in mind, it is least bit surprising that YouTube has decided to totally revamp the design of the top of its homepage, and will be rolling out a new version today.
Here’s the text and a screen-shot:
Along the top of the page are the now-familiar “home,” “videos,” “shows” and “channels” tabs, but no longer one for “community.” A few features have been removed from this area, to keep it as clean and functional as possible.
Leaving out “community”? To be fair, this was kind of a strange area. And your “Quicklist,” all the videos you tagged to watch later, can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/my_quicklist, and the country and language pull-down menus, once at the very top of the page, are now in the footer.”
The new version has eliminated most of the clutter and color of the old design, in favor of something that is unquestionably more Googleish.
The new layout also does a better job categorizing the main features of the site: the left side is now dedicated to finding videos, the right is dedicated to uploading and managing the clips you have seen.
And it is hard to say YouTube, given its size, has any one monolithic community these days. It may not sound like a huge deal, but just as very small tweaks on Google can have a major effect, a minor change to YouTube’s design may well change the way people use the site.