Executives at YouTube say they are revamping the video streamer’s smart TV apps with the goal of offering a more “lean in” experience for users.
In a blog post published in March, YouTube Interactive Designer Joe Hines and Product Manager Aishwarya Agarwal said the goal of refreshing the YouTube app for TV sets was to make the service more engaging to streamers.
In recent years, YouTube has seen more people use their video app on TV sets compared to computers, tablets and phones, with the app becoming one of the more-dominant on platforms like Android TV (Google TV), Roku and Amazon’s Fire TV.
“While the living room has traditionally been a place for lean back experiences, we’ve learned through our user research that when a viewer is excited about the content, they like to multitask: They flow between leaning back to watch, and leaning in to enhance their experience,” Hines and Agarwal wrote. “As a result, viewers want a richer, distraction-free TV experience that they feel in control of. With this in mind, our team sought to find a way to add greater engagement to the living room, while still striking the right balance between interactivity and immersion.”
While YouTube videos still fill the screen by default, users can also switch between a new interactive screen where the main player window shrinks slightly, allowing things like real-time comments, recommended videos and shoppable ads to live alongside whatever is playing on YouTube at a given time.
“Our new design will not only improve existing functionality like accessing video descriptions and comments, but also open the door for a broad range of new experiences such as shopping for your creators’ favorite products and viewing live scores for sports fans,” Hines and Agarwal said.
While the new features will play a more-prominent role in the YouTube experience on TVs, Hines and Agarwal said core features like pause, rewind and fast-forward shouldn’t get lost in the mix.
“Finding this balance meant simplifying user interactions to accommodate the remote control, while simultaneously making sure the new design would be applicable to a wide range of use cases,” they wrote.
Additionally, Hines and Agarwal said they couldn’t simply design a “one-size-fits-all” approach because certain videos and viewing experiences require customized video windows and customized features in order to keep distractions at a minimum.
“What users will be able to see on their TVs is a design solution that keeps the video front and center, but layers in the ability to access the features that make YouTube unique — all without interrupting the viewing experience,” they said.
