One of the first things my partner and I did when redesigning YouTube's home page was taking in mind the user's mental model. We moved the giant banner ad from it's ridiculous place at the top to the side, and added labels for out links to make them more obvious. By removing the banner ad we make the search bar the most prominent thing users see when first coming to YouTube, instead of them having to look for it. We also wanted to let our users pick from a variety of content on the home page, instead of force feeding "Recommended" videos that they may or may not want to see.
I think a programmer's implementation model would be very similar to the one YouTube is currently using, as it is almost arrogant in a way. YouTube has this amazing (I'm guessing) algorithm for deciding what videos should be "Recommended" to users, and the user's homepage is flooded with only those videos selected by the algorithm. YouTube thinks it knows what the user wants to see, which I would wager is not always accurate. How can somebody expand their horizons and discover new things if they are just being fed the same type of videos or ones closely related over and over?
No comments:
Post a Comment