YouTube this morning announced a homepage redesign focused on helping you “find the next great video to watch.” Available for desktop web and tablets, it takes the form of larger thumbnails to aid browsing. The Google site is also rolling out queuing and “Don’t recommend this channel.”
Homepage redesign
The video site is switching to “larger, richer thumbnails” that make possible higher-resolution previews. This also allows for longer video titles that provide more context before clicking. Channel icons are now included to make it “easier to recognize your favorite creators.” In practice, instead of seeing five videos across, you might only see four, with eight per shelf.
The general layout, including sections like Recommended, remains mostly unchanged. That said, YouTube is removing some content shelves as part of this cleaner design. According to YouTube, this adjustment has been in testing for the past “few months” and was briefly spotted in testing this August.
We’ve been experimenting with this updated design for a few months and — based on your input — have made dozens of improvements to the layout, most notably adjusting the thumbnail sizes and showing more videos on larger screens.
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Add to queue
After a successful experiment, YouTube is rolling out “add to queue,” with a new button in the overflow menu. When on the Home feed, search results, or channel page, adding a video to queue will open a Miniplayer at the bottom-right corner. The actual queue list is hidden, and can be expanded. You can rearrange the playback order and delete items.
Don’t recommend channel
The last change today sees the “Don’t recommend channel” feature roll out to desktop. First introduced on mobile earlier this year, you can tell YouTube to “stop suggesting videos from a particular channel” in your feeds. Coming soon is the ability to select topics to refine your Homepage and Up Next videos.
The YouTube homepage redesign begins rolling out today on the desktop web, as well as the Android and iOS tablet apps.
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