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Saturday, 4 August 2012

YouTube Updates Homepage Feed, Gives Users More Control

 
 Over the past couple of months YouTube has been experimenting with new homepage designs and today they’ve officially launched a new updated homepage.  Kurt Wilms, Product Manager at YouTube, reports on the YouTube Creator blog that the new design is a result of user feedback and features things like bigger video thumbnails, more control over what you see in your feed and more.


Here’s a rundown of what you can expect from the updated YouTube homepage feed:



Bigger video thumbnails with more information

The new design features bigger, higher-quality thumbnails as well as more information related to the video.  Whereas before you only saw the thumbnail, title and brief description, you now see more activity related to the video.  Wilms writes, “If an uploader has commented, posted, or added a video to a playlist, we surface this information so you can get a better picture of all the activity related to the video.”





More control over what’s featured in your feed

You’ll now find a dropdown menu that lets you control what content appears in your feed.  Hover over an item and click the arrow to hide the activity, unsubscribe from the channel or change the settings for that particular channel.




Keep track of videos you have already watched

If you’ve already watched a video that appears in your feed it will be marked as “watched” to help you keep track.





Highlights view

Wilms explains how Highlights view works: “The Highlights view, which is currently the default view of activity on the homepage feed, is designed to ensure that a diverse set of creators appear in a viewer’s feed based on their subscriptions.  Some creators publish videos once per week, while others publish many videos every day.  Highlights view helps ensure that prolific creators don’t crowd out more occasional publishers in your homepage feed.”
You can change the view from Highlights to Everything to see everything.




While the new homepage feed definitely addresses many user complaints, lots of people still aren’t happy.  L.Saul writes on the YouTube Creator blog post, “An improvement on rubbish is hardly an improvement at all.  We want the old layout back where you can actually see what your subscriptions have uploaded over the past few weeks.”  Rob writes, “Still stupid, make it so we see a grid of all the videos from the channels we are subscribed to.  Many partners have lost views because of how terrible the homepage is.”



Read the full story here





 

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