In November last year, we spotted YouTube testing a new layout for its full-screen player showing buttons for some commonly used features: liking or disliking, viewing comments, adding a video to a playlist, and sharing it with your friends or family. Three months later, the company has started officially rolling out this new design to all users.
The new layout is a significant step up in usability compared to the previous design that hid all these functions behind a swipe-up gesture. The “More videos” option now sits in the bottom right corner of the player, though it remains accessible via a swipe up on the display. It is also still possible to exit the full-screen player with a swipe-down gesture. And like before, you can check the video description by clicking on the title.
The changes are limited to the landscape full-screen player and are not applicable when playing videos vertically, where all these buttons and shortcuts have long been readily available. Ironically, the new design makes it easy to thumb-down a video in full-screen mode, but the change comes after the company started hiding the public count for dislikes.
The swipe-up gesture interfered with the navigation gesture on many Android devices leading to a poor user experience, so this is a welcome change. The new video player UI surfaces the important options instead of hiding them and makes accessing comments easier, which previously required you to switch to portrait mode, open the section, and go back to fullscreen again.
This is a server-side change from Google and should make its way to your Android device in the coming days and weeks, though the change is already live for a few members of our team. The company also confirmed to The Verge that the new layout would be coming to iOS devices.
Thanks: Moshe
Read Next
About The Author
