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.