Why Does It Look LIke That

As a large, and very powerful, website, Youtube contains a lot of meticulously placed details. These are there to make the website run smoother, provide a more enjoyable experience, and sometimes to keep the viewer on the website for longer periods of time. In many ways, the things done by Youtube are to help us and make us like the website, but some of it is manipulative as encouraging more watching increases the amount of money made off of ads.

The first obvious thing about Youtube is it's design. It would be interesting to know why they designed it the way that they did. To try and find the reasoning for the relatively simplistic color scheme, or the positioning of subscribe buttons, like meters, and various information about the videos. Everything has a reason, purpose, and effect on the overall experience of the website. There are many courses in website design, and occupations as website designers. These effects matter, and if we could see a breakdown of these reasoning it would not only make us more appreciative, but also better designers ourselves and smarter video watchers.

A lot of the design focuses around achieving Youtube's ultimate goal: get people onto the website watching videos.Some of the things I have noticed personally in the design, and how it achieves it's goal include the homepage showing all the featured videos, the "recommended" videos, the list of related videos on the side, the use of interesting pictures to advertise the videos, to provide a comment section, and many others. I'm sure they have a lot more techniques than I know about. That's why I would want to know, and feel other people should know. If we know the different methods Youtube uses to manipulate us, you can use that knowledge to avoid video traps, and to waste less time aimlessly searching Youtube.

Another thing that would be interesting to look at is the evolution of Youtube. How much it has changed from past design schemes, Just like any other website they go through major reforms, It would be extremely  interesting to see how they accumulated the critique and knowledge to decide those reforms as well. How much they use the comment system in their reforms would be extremely interesting to know, as it would dictate the amount of comments I leave, and how involved I become in contributing my own ideas. A very important ability for a website, as the web is a new and ever-changing media, to be able to adapt to the problems and critiques of their website.

As this information would require some personal stories and knowledge from the designers themselves, this might be one of the hardest research topics I've described this week.