San Francisco — Google-owned video-sharing site YouTube on Wednesday unleashed a major makeover, more streamlined YouTube homepage, aimed at moving out visual noise and capturing the attention of viewers, in an effort to lengthen the time users stay on the site.
Now YouTube is hoping to beam a spotlight on some of those behind-the-scene enhancements with a new design of its “watch page.” The fresh makeover comes after a year of planning, and serves two purposes. First, it provides a cleaner UI that is “more subdued, stripped down and simple than before,” according to a January blog post by Yahoo designer Julian Frumar and software engineer Igor Kofman. Second, it is formulated to improve the site’s attachment by getting visitors to watch more videos and (hopefully) never leave.
According to YouTube, the revamped video page is more simpler and more streamlined, and is organized as such to appeal to power users and novices alike, and claims that some version of this page has been visited 1 billion times each day.
At first glance, the changes are subtle, but longtime YouTubers will spot the changes right off. It has big search box at the top, underscoring the fact that YouTube is the second-most-used search engine after Google, which owns YouTube.
“We really thought like we needed to step back and remove the clutter,” Google product manager Shiva Rajaraman said as he provided an in-depth look at the revamped YouTube home page to be fully rolled out by late Wednesday.
“Changes are based on how people actually use YouTube.”
YouTube engineers said they researched the way people behave at the website and modified the home page accordingly. Gone are the “color and crap” at the top of the page, said Rajaraman. Also, the number of links on the page have been cut by more than half.
The purpose is to mesmerized users to watch “sessions” of videos rather than just one video, he said. For example, users that arrive at a page via a search will see those search results continued down the right-hand side, so that they can continue exploring the site even as the video begins playing.
According to YouTube, users watch an average of 15 minutes of videos on the site per day. That is small potatoes compared to generic television, where users watch several hours, Rajaraman said. The solution? Simplify the page.
“We are attempting to blend information in one place, and hide actions that are not critical,” Rajaraman said. From a code perspective, that also “lightened” the page, cutting the code and time to render it by 20 percent, according to Igor Kofman, a YouTube software engineer.
“We developed an option for you to watch 15, 20 or 30 minutes of content,” Rajaraman said. “You can sit back and click ‘next,’ ‘next,’ ‘next.’ We want users to leave because they run out of time, not because they run out of things to watch.”
Users can opt in to using the new format by visiting this YouTube page. (Users can then opt back out here.) YouTube plans to iterate and add new feature over the next six weeks or so, officials said.
About 10 percent of YouTube’s users can see the new format now; it will roll out by 7pm Pacific time on Wednesday for everyone else, YouTube executives said.
“We hope that when people settle in with the new interface it will cater to how they have been interacting with it all along,” Frumar added.
Prominence has been given to the uploader who provided the video to the community, as well as the ability to add a brand in place of the username, especially useful to partners. The ability to subscribe has been made more prominent, and placed at the top, Frumar said.
“At the end of the day we think there a lot of cool stuff we can do in this space,” Rajaraman said.