I watched a short video this morning of Mr. Rogers appealing to a Washington committee for $20 million in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He is absolutely spell-binding. What I love about Mr. Rogers is his clarity of emotion and his cadence. His speech is slow, clear, and utterly captivating. He exudes genuine kindness and gratitude. He says more with less. A favorite quote:

“If we .. can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health. I think that it’s much more dramatic that two men could be working out their feelings of anger — much more dramatic — than showing something of gunfire.”

YouTube: August 2005


August 2007

Here’s some real estate speculation for you. In the last post I focused changes to YouTube’s toolbar over two years. In this one, I want to talk more broadly about the whole page and how it has changed since August 2005. This is less about particular vocabulary, white space, and other details, and more about the audience and the content.

What was removed?

• New user hand holding - before, a big box in the most valuable part of the page introduced the site, with one sentence dedicated to each of Watch, Upload, and Share. This box is entirely gone. Today, watching is self-explanatory, especially thanks to the big video that automatically loads in the top right corner. Upload has moved to a prominent button in the top right (with an arrow graphic), and Share is just intuitively obvious in the “Broadcast Yourself” tagline and in the content itself.
• The tag cloud - early YouTube had a cloud of recent video tags. Tags were hot back then. I could go on about tag clouds and their failures, but I’m guessing it came down to three things: 1) they tell without showing — and on a video sharing site, why not just show? 2) they are rarely clicked, and 3) they are visually cluttered. Beyond the tag cloud, YouTube also removed the list of tags from the Featured Videos metadata. Good riddance — a category, title, and humane description work better.
• Excessive tabs and links - See my previous post
• Recent users online - This is when YouTube thought they were a social network. We see a list of 8 recent users, along with counts of videos, favorites, and friends for each of them. This was removed for obvious scaling reasons: after a community grows beyond, say, 500 users, this just isn’t interesting information for anyone.
• Sign up promotion - a bold yellow box, in a very valuable spot, beckons you to sign up. It’s not very convincing, though. Chances are, you’re going to sign up only when you’re trying to do something else. You’re not signing up for the sake of signing up. So why push the issue? Instead, the new YouTube has a login box in the right column, and a small “sign up” link on the top right in case you really can’t wait.
• Video of the month contest - This has been replaced by all kinds of slicker cross-promoted contents and ads.

What was added?

• Videos being watched right now - Certainly more interesting than list of recent users. This is a dynamic Flash piece that flips through recent videos until you roll over something.
• Promoted Videos and Ads - The revenue has to come from somewhere, right? And now that Diddy is out there with his camcorder, now that the networks have gotten hip to this, the cross promotions are flying all over the place. August 2007’s YouTube features the presidential debates (YouChoose), a huge promo video for UFC on Pay Per View, and a series of promoted videos across the top of the home page (how much do these cost?).
• Video ratings - the five star system. People love their stars. As if being featured or having a high view count is not enough. Most videos on the front page of YouTube have four or five stars. But some of the most watched videos have poor ratings because they’re controversial. So effectively, stars are more a measure of controversy than quality.
• Tabbed video listing - It isn’t just about featured videos anymore. You can choose to see Most Viewed, Most Discussed, and Top Favorites as well. These other three categories tend to have a lot of overlap, so it’s good that YouTube doesn’t waste time showing more than one of them at a time. On the other hand, what’s the difference between Most Viewed and Most Discussed, from the user’s perspective? Does anyone care?
• “What’s New” box - something for the returning users? A post from the YouTube corporate blog. A promotion for mobile videos (iPhone!)
• Popular Videos for Mobile Devices box - YouTube is very proud of their iPhone partnership, and they should be.

Overall, they’ve made huge improvements, if that wasn’t obvious from the page grabs. The data/ink ratio is so much higher, and the information hierarchy is more clear (the old YouTube had too many elements with similar priorities). Even the promotions are mostly pure content, so you hardly notice you’re being promoted on!

The Internet Archive is great for looking at web site usability changes over time. Lets just look at one part of one site: the toolbar on YouTube.com.
December 2005


August 2006


February 2007


August 2007

The changes are not subtle. This is over a period of two years, as the site grew from a niche into one of the biggest sites in the world. So I’m going to try to read between the lines, imagining some of the lessons learned by YouTube over the last couple years.

• Notice the rise and fall of administrative debris. After the toolbar was initially introduced (not long before December 2005), it had to pass through a painful bloat phase before reaching relative simplicity.
• In the early days, they may have needed the “watch and share your videos worldwide” tagline. By August 2006, YouTube was confidently mainstream—or their site had reached self-explanatory usability nirvana—so they shortened the tagline. I’m wondering if they ever needed the old tagline at all. But in general, it seems that as a company becomes more well-known, their logo can get very small, and the content itself becomes the logo and tagline (OK, some logos stay huge anyway). The content and interface become the identifying mark. The interface is the brand, and the logo is just there so you know what to call the interface.
• YouTube may have had ambitions about being a strong social network at first, but today it’s very clearly video centered. The “User Search” option is gone, the “Friends” tab is gone, and the Community tab is about group videos, not friends or individual users. My question is, did they even need those features in 2005? Was the “Friends” tab key to their viral growth, or was it always a bad idea?
• They finally found the right place for the search box: front and center, and highlighted by a darker background. Just between Feburary and August 2007, they’ve been able to shrink the height of the toolbar tremendously. I bet search is the most common function on YouTube after watching videos. “Did you see the latest Spiderman dance video?”
• The word “Home” on YouTube means home from YouTube’s perspective, not from the user’s perspective! It means “Our home page where we put the stuff we want you to see.” It does not mean “The place where all my stuff is,” as it does on Facebook.
• As a result, all of the “My Stuff” link cruft does not belong under the Home tab. A series of “My”s followed by one word make my eyes glaze over, anyway: the “My Account” page, which has sections for all of the relevant My items, is much simpler. By August 2006, “My Account” is among the utility links. As a side note, given that Home means YouTube’s Home and not My Home, shouldn’t “My Account” really be called “Your Account”?
• In fact, the home tab doesn’t even need to be a tab! Click the logo. In fact, if you hover over today’s logo, the word “Home” appears to its right. What if the logo were a tab, as with Amazon or Apple? The logo-as-tab is kind of irrational (what are the other tabs, if not part of Amazon?), but it works.
• It’s hard to see from my site grabs, but today’s tabs are slightly bigger than the tabs of 2005, now that there are fewer of them.
• “Groups” becomes “Community” — and that’s good, because Groups could be groups of anything. Communities are groups of people.
• “My Subscriptions” was folded into the “Channels” tab. On YouTube, a channel is a subscription to someone’s videos. But channels make me think of TV channels, and today’s TV channels are centered around subject areas (“Categories”), not people. Without clicking, I couldn’t have told you the difference between Categories and Channels. These areas must be for frequent/return visitors.
• Feb 2007: What is a QuickList, anyway? Obviously no one took the bait, and now it’s gone.
• A brief try at “Upload Videos” (Feb 2007) goes back to “Upload” (Aug 2007), “Search Videos” (Dec 2005) becomes “Search” (Aug 2006), and “Viewing History” (Aug 2006) is just “History” (Feb 2007). In fact, any word referring to videos or viewing is redundantly obvious and wisely removed.

(see also: Maine lake time series 1)