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Redesigned YouTube Takes Aim at the Boob Tube, Trolls

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YouTube will change the look of every single one of its video pages Wednesday afternoon with a redesign meant to reduce visual noise and clutter, make it friendlier to watch longer-form content, increase viewing time, and introduce new playlists that follow you around the site as you search, browse and watch.

If you read our coverage of the stealth rollout back in January, you've already been able to access some of this redesign using a special link. YouTube is rolling the changes out across its entire site, so that starting Wednesday evening, every visitor will encounter the new redesign.

The problem with YouTube as it existed this morning, according to senior product manager Shiva Rajaraman, is that the site launched too many features in 2009 more than in the previous two years combined and tried to cram them onto the video-playback page without enough concern for how people were using them.

The basic idea was that pixels were cheap, and what that meant is that there was a lot of wasteful use of real estate, said Rajaraman during a press conference call on Wednesday afternoon. In the future, pixels will be expensive. Were going to guard, essentially, the usage of our page and ensure that only the actions that matter are presented there, as opposed to showing all actions all the time.

Extensive focus groups and user testing over the past several months revealed the need for a number of changes:

Sparse layout The top area of a YouTube page contains much less content and clutter, with an emphasis on search. The new design embraces passive users who just want to watch, while encouraging them to become uploaders, according to Rajaman. For more on YouTube's sparser design, read our earlier coverage.

Taking new aim at the boob tube.

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