2021-05 - YouTube UX

Sometimes, I wonder how the product backlog on YouTube looks like.

“Okay, right now, a user can select the menu, choose a quality and get the quality they want right away. It’s always worked like that since YouTube started”.

“Let’s change that: now, a user can instead suggest the quality they want and the app decides on behalf of the user if “high quality” will actually give high quality or a potato instead. Or we can let them choose the quality like before, but they have to waste their time tapping another option to reach it.”

What a pile of flaming UX garbage. Clearly, they did this to either help those who aren’t familiar about resolution options like 4K or 1080p and they added more friction to save on bandwidth costs.