08 Jul YouTube Receives UX Facelift with "Cosmic Panda" Redesign
Posted at 15:28h
in YouTube Marketing
In a game changing move from the Google UX team, YouTube recently announced its Cosmic Panda redesign. (There were also announcements made about a Gmail redesign. Blog post about those changes to follow.)
There are a host of changes to the new YouTube infrastructure, most of which involve stripping channels of a lot of individuality. They’re soliciting for feedback, so it’s not entirely clear if this will be how the final product will look. However, it is clear that YouTube is making some significant changes to the UX of the network. Here are some of the Cosmic Panda biggies that you should know about:
- A more “module-based” interface. All of the pieces are tied to visual design assets instead of previous text-heavy designs.
- Brand channels have almost no special branding options. (I tend to believe that this will change in the final release.)
- Users have the option to choose between 4 templates: “Creator,” “Blogger,” “Network,” or “Everything.”
- A much less-cluttered option to choose viewing size.
- New sizes tailored for large monitors.The design is only 10px wider than the current version, but all of the design assets are bigger, making it a “taller” design. There’s little concern that the majority of the content is below the fold. This could be an interesting move away from designing based on traditional laptop standards.
- Larger screenshots for suggested videos means fewer suggested videos on the sidebar of the page. However, there is a new “Suggested Video” button on every video page that transforms the entire bottom half of the page to callouts for related content.
- Channel comments have been moved to a new “page” that can be found by clicking the community tab on a channel.
What other differences have you found? What do you think of the new design?
Homepage Before
Homepage Redesigned
User Channel Before
User Channel Redesigned
User Channel Options Before
User Channel Options Redesigned
Brand Channel Before
Brand Channel Redesigned
Video Page Before (with ad space)
Video Page Redesigned (with ad space)
Video Page Before (Promoted Video- no ad space)
Video Page Redesigned (Promoted Video- no ad space)
Playlist Before
Playlist Redesigned
Search Results Before
Search Results Redesigned
