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I've already addressed the situation on launch day in Part one and some history of changes in design and useability in Part Two.
All that's left then is to directly address the new video page itself. What works? What doesn't?
First, a screenshot of the page cropped to better fit my journal space:
It's very ... white and rather sterile looking. If this video were in widescreen the related videos section would be shunted down vertically.
The first thing any YouTube veteran will notice (well, ok, maybe) is the lack of the star ratings. The designers are trying to convert the site over to a binary Like/Dislike system. You can see the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons. I say trying because, well ... I'll get to that very soon.
Okay so there's a new rating system. Unfortunately the ratings aren't displayed anywhere on the video page.
They're nowhere to be found on the search page either. Some commenters to YouTube's blog have postulated it's a sly attempt to increase clicks across the board as searchers are forced to wade through videos that would otherwise be selected against by the ratings system. I rather doubt deliberate malice since bandwidth is an ever-stated cost concern. The stars were by no means a 100% accurate system. No rating system ever will be. It was subject to the whims of votebots and plenty of users rated mostly with the extremes. However, it wasn't binary and allowed for grading along a curve.
Apparently the YouTube design department thinks it's userbase is too stupid to use such a system hence their insistence on simplifying it. But ...
They didn't change over to like/dislike tallies here in the playlist editing window.
They also didn't change over the my_videos page. Apparently video owners aren't supposed to be able to quickly and easily tell what the actual ratings on their videos are now.
Of course the like/dislike tally isn't visible by default under a video now. That would be useful and we can't have that!
I just rated up my own video, sweet! In fact video owners can uplike their own videos twice although if the video had no prior ratings the first gets eaten by the system and vanishes into the ether. Bugs on top of bugs. Yowza, what a spectacular rollout.
I'm going to quote someone from the blog post claiming to speak on behalf of the YouTube staff - or at least giving that impression by their choice of language. Blogger doesn't allow linking directly to comments so you'll have to scroll down to find it.
"Christine said...
@Alex @Eric Regarding your comment on the 5-star rating, although popular, the old star rating system, didn’t do this. The vast majority of ratings were 5 stars (nearly 90%) with 4, 3, 2 and 1 stars making up only 13% of all ratings. With such skewed data set, stars were clearly a poor indicator of what to watch. Now, with “like” and “dislike,” the choice is simple and the indication is far clearer. Users can expand the section to see just how much like or dislike a video has gotten. This is a far better sign of what’s worth watching and what’s not."
I haven't figured out whether this is a blatant lie or just someone in PR woefully misinformed about the changeover. There is no button to "expand the section." There is only the statistics button - one of two buttons that have no tooltip unless you're the video owner. Clicking that brings up this if the video has any statistics to track and the information is tagged as public. This is the default state but the video owner can hide this information with one mouseclick.
I've highlighted the statistics arrow with a black box in the screenshot above. As we can see the ratings on display here are still geared towards the old star system. Okay, what about a video with no ratings?
A big fat nothing. However, I'm not content to let it rest there. A couple more screenshots should drive home the point of just how half-assed this conversion is.
Here's a video posted well after the changeover on April 5th. Obviously someone clicked the like button as it has a 5-star rating on the my_videos page.
However when I go to the video page itself and click the more stats button this is all that's displayed. There are no ratings, no likes or dislikes. One last thing for this post:
There are no ratings, at all, on the view_play_list page. This makes no sense at all unless they just haven't coded in a like/dislike display yet. All in all it seems like the design team is doing everything it possibly can to obscure ratings. I'm not going to speculate why. There's plenty of that elsewhere on the net. All I will say is that it's foolhardy and hurts the system overall.
That's a wrap for part 3. In the next post I'll take an in-depth look at playlists.
UPDATE: (4/15/2010) The star ratings have been stripped from the playlist editor, the my_videos page and the recommended videos scroll upon finishing a video.
All that's left then is to directly address the new video page itself. What works? What doesn't?
First, a screenshot of the page cropped to better fit my journal space:
It's very ... white and rather sterile looking. If this video were in widescreen the related videos section would be shunted down vertically.
The first thing any YouTube veteran will notice (well, ok, maybe) is the lack of the star ratings. The designers are trying to convert the site over to a binary Like/Dislike system. You can see the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons. I say trying because, well ... I'll get to that very soon.
Okay so there's a new rating system. Unfortunately the ratings aren't displayed anywhere on the video page.
They're nowhere to be found on the search page either. Some commenters to YouTube's blog have postulated it's a sly attempt to increase clicks across the board as searchers are forced to wade through videos that would otherwise be selected against by the ratings system. I rather doubt deliberate malice since bandwidth is an ever-stated cost concern. The stars were by no means a 100% accurate system. No rating system ever will be. It was subject to the whims of votebots and plenty of users rated mostly with the extremes. However, it wasn't binary and allowed for grading along a curve.
Apparently the YouTube design department thinks it's userbase is too stupid to use such a system hence their insistence on simplifying it. But ...
They didn't change over to like/dislike tallies here in the playlist editing window.
They also didn't change over the my_videos page. Apparently video owners aren't supposed to be able to quickly and easily tell what the actual ratings on their videos are now.
Of course the like/dislike tally isn't visible by default under a video now. That would be useful and we can't have that!
I just rated up my own video, sweet! In fact video owners can uplike their own videos twice although if the video had no prior ratings the first gets eaten by the system and vanishes into the ether. Bugs on top of bugs. Yowza, what a spectacular rollout.
I'm going to quote someone from the blog post claiming to speak on behalf of the YouTube staff - or at least giving that impression by their choice of language. Blogger doesn't allow linking directly to comments so you'll have to scroll down to find it.
"Christine said...
@Alex @Eric Regarding your comment on the 5-star rating, although popular, the old star rating system, didn’t do this. The vast majority of ratings were 5 stars (nearly 90%) with 4, 3, 2 and 1 stars making up only 13% of all ratings. With such skewed data set, stars were clearly a poor indicator of what to watch. Now, with “like” and “dislike,” the choice is simple and the indication is far clearer. Users can expand the section to see just how much like or dislike a video has gotten. This is a far better sign of what’s worth watching and what’s not."
I haven't figured out whether this is a blatant lie or just someone in PR woefully misinformed about the changeover. There is no button to "expand the section." There is only the statistics button - one of two buttons that have no tooltip unless you're the video owner. Clicking that brings up this if the video has any statistics to track and the information is tagged as public. This is the default state but the video owner can hide this information with one mouseclick.
I've highlighted the statistics arrow with a black box in the screenshot above. As we can see the ratings on display here are still geared towards the old star system. Okay, what about a video with no ratings?
A big fat nothing. However, I'm not content to let it rest there. A couple more screenshots should drive home the point of just how half-assed this conversion is.
Here's a video posted well after the changeover on April 5th. Obviously someone clicked the like button as it has a 5-star rating on the my_videos page.
However when I go to the video page itself and click the more stats button this is all that's displayed. There are no ratings, no likes or dislikes. One last thing for this post:
There are no ratings, at all, on the view_play_list page. This makes no sense at all unless they just haven't coded in a like/dislike display yet. All in all it seems like the design team is doing everything it possibly can to obscure ratings. I'm not going to speculate why. There's plenty of that elsewhere on the net. All I will say is that it's foolhardy and hurts the system overall.
That's a wrap for part 3. In the next post I'll take an in-depth look at playlists.
UPDATE: (4/15/2010) The star ratings have been stripped from the playlist editor, the my_videos page and the recommended videos scroll upon finishing a video.
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