What you need to know
- YouTube is flighting a new design for desktop and tablet users.
- It features larger and more prominently placed thumbnails.
- There's also a new option to add videos to your queue or to stop YouTube from recommending channels you don't like.
Since August, YouTube has been A/B testing a new design for its homepage for desktops — which will, of course, also roll over to tablet apps — and the company has finally decided to make it official today.
The revamped homepage affords greater importance to video thumbnails, which are now larger and can also show longer titles as a result. You also get to see the icon for the channel it's from, for that quick visual feedback to help you identify if the video is worth your time or not. The rest of the design is pretty much the same. An obvious consequence of the increased thumbnail size is, of course, going to be a reduction in the density of videos you can see at a given time, so you might need to scroll a bit more than before.
Thankfully, to help you avoid carpal tunnel syndrome, YouTube is finally allowing you to disable recommendations from channels you don't want to see. Also to help save you from having to unnecessarily keep scrolling the homepage (or open 20 different YouTube tabs at a time as I do), the desktop experience finally supports a queue. Once you close the browser, though, YouTube will delete your queue, though Google points out you can always add videos to your 'Watch Later' playlist if you want the video to be saved for later.
The company is also promising to soon port over from the Android app the ability to more precisely curate what you see on your homepage based on your favorite topics.
