Okay. So we all know YouTube has been playing around with the layouts. Lots of people in the twittersphere (and no, I don’t only write about twitter events) have a strong viewpoint on these changes, but this article is about the latest ‘beta’ update. Google has never been known for its amazing design taste, but this takes the biscuit (irritating English expression demonstrating the most extreme instance of the context - you know you love it really):

At the bottom of most videos is a new button, labelled *new* YouTube Player Beta, hit it, and you can see what I mean. Now, I am aware that this is in beta, and bugs like the fact that scrubbing is awkward, and features are missing, like that useful component of the scrubber bar that told you where you were actually scrubbing to (always good to know - closest keyframe for those used to video encoding for the web), but it’s still way from completion. Anyway, my main complaint, in fact, is the look..

From the image above, it’s probably hard to see, as it really doesn’t look that bad when idle. However, the ugliness begins to shine through when you plan on actually using the application. Firstly, the white background. Why? I presume it’s designed to fit into the look of the rest of the page, and yes, it does that well. But when you hit the full screen button (covered later), on what monitor in the world will it look good, having a huge white gap above and below the video? It’s made worse by the controls being aligned with the video. That’s a really easy fix, just making a single movieclip in the background, or even changing the background colour (although I can appreciate the potential bugs) when in full screen mode.

Next are the actual buttons. Firstly is the volume slider, which I admit to being a fan of, in concept. But, I don’t think anybody can appreciate the strange speaker icon, or the curious white border around it. It just doesn’t fit. And anyway, it defeats the one thing we like about the original player, the simplicity. When we go to YouTube, we don’t want the cut-down, compact view you get when viewing embedded videos. Apologies for the strange alignment.

This brings me on nicely to the slider. From the screenshot I’ve uploaded below, it (arguably) doesn’t look particularly bad. However, when you view it, with the rest of the (attempted) minimalist page, it just looks out of place, sitting there, 3x darker than everything else.

Probably the biggest design flaw, potentially a bug, in the new beta view, is the final screen:

What on earth possessed the poorly aligned (and designed) buttons, and the replacing of the old, pleasant arrows? I’ll leave that up to you to form an opinion. If you do happen to form a opinion (which I’m hoping you will), just post a quick comment on here, because I’m as interested as ever on your opinions.

Another painful effort to be added to YouTube’s portfolio of unloved features.