Thursday, December 6, 2012

YouTube Wasting People's Lives

Yes! Normally I don't bitch about a free service changing (Read: Facebook), but YouTube has changed about 75% of the site. Most of it I'm cool with, and I can still find stuff. But on the main page is where I have my subscriptions listed with uploads only. Before I could just reload the page to see if there were any new updates because it would remember that I only wanted to see uploads. Now it forgets every time. So it gives me two options: reload the page and click subscriptions then upload activity, or click subscriptions but still have to specify upload activity.
It means an extra click, but that's a serious issue in designing software and web sites. I remember in college being taught about something to this effect. It had to do with how much time, over time, are you wasting of a person's life doing something? For example, if you have to click 2 things to get to where you want to go on your bank's website, average load time is around 5-10 seconds. Even at 5 seconds you may not mind, but say you check your bank statement twice a day, once before work and another after work. That's around 15 times a week, multiplied by 10 seconds is 150 seconds, or 2.5 minutes you've wasted of someone's life. 2.5 minutes multiplied by 52 weeks is over 4 hours of someone's life in a year just to check a bank statement.

As a developer, you would design the program or web site to cut that time down as much as possible. So in overhauling YouTube, as a developer, why would you design something that used to be quick and easy into something that takes longer? I can only imagine that unless I'm looking for something, the only reason I go to YouTube is my subscriptions, and the only reason I look at my subscriptions is to see what they uploaded. YouTube, like Wal-Mart, wants you to look and "buy" everything that you look at. In a way, YouTube is forcing you to look at stuff you just want to ignore and not waste your time on. For one of the most hated corporations in America, YouTube is following their game plan.

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