14 DAY TRIAL // While most of the focus has been on the financial side of YouTube lately, the site is still churning up new features at a steady pace and has just now revealed a redesigned landing page. The changes focus on the top section, the masthead, cleaning up the overall look and better separating the different feature groups. The most important change though comes from the bigger and more emphasized search box, in keeping with Google's core business.
“You may notice something looks a little different about our masthead (top navigational area on the homepage) today, and that's because we've done a bit of housecleaning. We've streamlined and simplified the design to focus on the primary experience of YouTube: watching a video,” Shiva Rajaraman, product manager, wrote on the YouTube blog. “The left side is dedicated to exploration: finding videos to watch through search and browse. The right side is all about organization of the videos that matter most to you: your subscriptions, your recent viewing history, and your own uploads.”
The changes may not stand out at first but the overall look is a lot more “Googleish,” with fewer design elements and the main buttons being just simple links. The left side is now geared towards finding new videos with the Videos, Channels and Shows sections bundled together along with the new search box. On the right are the more user-centric sections like their own uploaded videos, their history and subscriptions. Some less popular buttons were removed from the masthead, like the country selection, the inbox and quicklist.
The biggest and more noticeable change is the new search box, which now takes up almost half of the section, whereas before it was in a somewhat odd central position and was significantly smaller. While this may not seem that important it is a very significant move both philosophically, since Google is at heart a search company after all, but also practically, encouraging users to do more searches and changing the way they discover new videos. YouTube is already the number two search engine in the US on its own, with 3.6 billion queries in June, overtaking Yahoo, which managed just 2.9 billion.