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[Completion of this entry was delayed until April 15th however I did check to ensure that nothing had changed in the way YouTube handles playlists in the interim.]
At the end of my last entry I said I was going to touch on playlists. I do have a few other points that I want to get to in this post but the current state of playlist functionality and accessibility represents both success and failure on the part of YouTube's design team.
For the history of this series see part 1, part 2, and part 3.
For someone searching for a particular video or just surfing YouTube in general playlists probably barely register as important. For myself they are absolutely critical to my enjoyment of the site. I use them to organize my video game series and look to them for watching serial videos of other users. If they don't work properly I thus notice.
In order to access playlists through the revised channel page requires viewing the playlist subpage itself. This is what it looks like when expanded to the grid view. The section at the time, which is a jumbled mess that can't seem to recognize line breaks (a problem with how the system stores the description and is shared by the view_play_list page).
The full description is only visible in grid view, invoking the bug I referenced in part 2. Also of note is that the URL displayed just goes to this page as-is. It does not lead to the view_play_list page which I have added to the playlist description and is underlined in black in the screenshot above. I add it as a courtesy because I know how useful accessing the playlist through view_play_list is and how annoying it is to manually type the correct URL.
Why is this such a problem. Well let's go through the steps of trying to get the playlist visible on the video page. Here we have the playlist view in it's default state on the channel page. When I click on the first video...
You have to click the 'View comments...' link to go to the video page.
It has a very curious lack of anything resembling the actual playlist that brought me here. This is simply unacceptable as it forces the viewer to constantly shift back and forth between the channel page and individual video pages.
Here's the view_play_list page. There's no link to it. You have to know how to type it in or copy and paste. I can click the 'Play All Videos' link or any individual video listed here to go to...
... a version of the video page with the playlist visible. That was quite a lot of bending over backwards working around poor design choices just to get to something that SHOULD be easily accessible from the channel page!
At the end of my last entry I said I was going to touch on playlists. I do have a few other points that I want to get to in this post but the current state of playlist functionality and accessibility represents both success and failure on the part of YouTube's design team.
For the history of this series see part 1, part 2, and part 3.
For someone searching for a particular video or just surfing YouTube in general playlists probably barely register as important. For myself they are absolutely critical to my enjoyment of the site. I use them to organize my video game series and look to them for watching serial videos of other users. If they don't work properly I thus notice.
In order to access playlists through the revised channel page requires viewing the playlist subpage itself. This is what it looks like when expanded to the grid view. The section at the time, which is a jumbled mess that can't seem to recognize line breaks (a problem with how the system stores the description and is shared by the view_play_list page).
The full description is only visible in grid view, invoking the bug I referenced in part 2. Also of note is that the URL displayed just goes to this page as-is. It does not lead to the view_play_list page which I have added to the playlist description and is underlined in black in the screenshot above. I add it as a courtesy because I know how useful accessing the playlist through view_play_list is and how annoying it is to manually type the correct URL.
Why is this such a problem. Well let's go through the steps of trying to get the playlist visible on the video page. Here we have the playlist view in it's default state on the channel page. When I click on the first video...
...the video loads on the channel page. This is technically useable but prevents the viewer from seeing comments or adding any of their own.
You have to click the 'View comments...' link to go to the video page.
It has a very curious lack of anything resembling the actual playlist that brought me here. This is simply unacceptable as it forces the viewer to constantly shift back and forth between the channel page and individual video pages.
Here's the view_play_list page. There's no link to it. You have to know how to type it in or copy and paste. I can click the 'Play All Videos' link or any individual video listed here to go to...
... a version of the video page with the playlist visible. That was quite a lot of bending over backwards working around poor design choices just to get to something that SHOULD be easily accessible from the channel page!
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