To date, YouTube on televisions has been a leanback experience focused on displaying fullscreen content. An upcoming redesign of YouTube video player for TVs adds more interactivity.
YouTube set out to “find a way to add greater engagement to the living room, while still striking the right balance between interactivity and immersion.”
This new UI shrinks the video window and shows a column of viewing stats, channel name, description, comments, and shopping features. Previously, tapping the name of a video with your remote would open that information as a floating overlay that covers the right side of the video, with YouTube noting how “obscuring the video would be detrimental to the viewing experience.”
This new approach “layers in the ability to access the features that make YouTube unique — all without interrupting the viewing experience.”
In designing, YouTube wanted to “ensure that the primary video actions (pause, rewind, fast forward) remained easily accessible and intuitive.” It prototyped several options that ranged “in complexity based on the number of steps a user would need to take ranging from simple (toggling the design on or off) to moderate (enabling lightweight controls over the video player) to complex (all controls are accessible in the small player window).”
YouTube believes this dual-column UI will support a “broad range of new experiences such as shopping for your creators’ favorite products and viewing live scores for sports fans” going forward, while providing more prominent access to chapters and key plays.
This is rolling out to the YouTube app on TV “in the next few days.” It’s also coming to “YouTube TV subscribers so they can explore Views without disrupting the game they’re watching.”
Looking heading:
We’ll continue to explore how we can extend this to support our growing set of interactive experiences on TVs, such as live chat, fantasy view, and multiview.
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