YT: Changes to YouTube Channel & Interface

Video sharing site YouTube is an important component of a successful social media strategy, and a recent makeover to the Browse Page, Video Editor, and Video Manager, have made it even more user-friendly, even if they are only surface changes. Below, we list those changes now in place, and those we’d still like to see.

Updates to Browse Page:

The new design aims to make easier to find and subscribe to channels, and as such has put measures in place to enhance the efficiency and relevancy of your browsing results:

• Channels you subscribe to are now added to your personalized home page
• You can now browse content by category

While these changes are not particularly dramatic, they do create a more flexible browsing experience, and allow the user that much more control for tailoring their searches and finding exactly what they want more quickly.

Updates to Video Editor:

Now that browsing is easier for users, be sure to take advantage of the new features with Video Editor to make your videos that much more appealing. Sporting a modern, polished look, the new Video Editor now provides features that are both snazzy and necessary:

• Easier clip-trimming
• A new timeline

Again, these features are more tweaks than striking changes; however, these tweaks should make the video editing process smoother, which means you can provide better looking content at a much faster rate than before.

Updates to Video Manager:

With updates to Video Editor comes updates to Video Manager, whose modern look boasts new features and revival of old favourites. New features include:

• Search history
• Claimed videos

Old favourites have been revisited to become better than ever, and include:

• Display of scheduled uploads
• Likes and Dislikes – now as video statistics
• Video sorting by popularity

The changes to Video Manager in particular reflect YouTube’s concentrated effort to improve the overall quality of the site; users don’t just want new features, they often want back reliable former features that were lost in earlier site transformation.

But what about…?

These tweaks to YouTube have definitely enhanced the site and ensured that it will remain a top choice for social media. However, these changes are surface changes only; YouTube still offers only limited access to data controls. This prevents you from monitoring an important part of your social media strategies, namely, trends. The user should be able to spot and track trends, but time options for browsing restrict this. At present, there are four time windows: ‘Today’, ‘This Week’, ‘This Month’ and ‘All Time’. Though user searches often include most-viewed or most-subscribed, these are the only browse options in the time windows. What if a user would like to access the most-viewed videos for any given month of any given year? To compare October 2010’s most-viewed with that of results for a year later, October 2011? Or what if the user would like to access the data for videos viewed for a longer period of time than for four weeks?

The browse options now provided block helpful interpretations of data; random browses do not allow trends to stand out as they would were more control options offered. To put it in perspective, this desired custom filter is provided by other social media services, such as Analytics. This makes it even more frustrating for users; while their new look and features are well-received and do improve the user experience, YouTube could have easily gone one step further and improved their site more substantially.

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