YouTube is no stranger when it comes to regularly testing out UI changes. Some of the changes it has tested in the past have made sense, while others clearly haven’t.
If you’ve logged into YouTube on a computer recently, you might have seen an example of the latter. For some, YouTube’s recommended videos section seems to be screaming for attention.
The new UI experiment replaces the classic compact list of recommended videos in the right-aligned sidebar for massively enlarged thumbnails, as pointed out by PiunikaWeb. Not only does this cause the video page to look like a ‘chonky’ mess, it also causes fewer recommendations to fit on the screen, essentially forcing users to scroll down just to see the content that previously could fit on the first fold.
Reports about the new UI have made their way to Reddit and even X, with one user even saying that it is “bordering on unusable.”
Bigger isn’t always better
Those thumbnails are clearly bigger than what I’m currently seeing on my YouTube, with the streaming giant likely rolling out the change in an attempt to make users notice them more. In my opinion, however, the change seems a bit too much and a step backward when it comes to accessibility and usability.
While I understand the fact that YouTube wants more eyes to fall on the recommended section, I feel like the bigger thumbnails pull focus away from the actual video being watched.
Elsewhere, while the comment section used to take up the majority of the horizontal space, the new UI changes that too. It looks like the layout has been sliced right down the middle, with comments now taking up almost half of the horizontal space, while recommended videos take up the other half, as seen in the Reddit post embedded above and the X embed below.
Are you seeing the giant sidebar, or is your YouTube view still compact like it used to be? Let us know in the comments below!
