Sometimes Big Companies make Big Mistakes. Let’s learn from them.

A week ago I got a notification from the play store saying about updating few apps, so I updated them but at that time I don’t know about the tragic thing which will be happening to me in the future.

I opened my youtube (it looks similar) I just swipe the feed and just tap on one of Mr. beast’s videos that Youtube recommends to me and saw the quality moves to 144p and saw that Mr. beast is looking like Mrs. beauty, bad joke :)

So I just move to the quality settings and saw the new update. Initially, I just think it’s great to just tap on the high-quality option and Youtube just makes my video quality high. easy..

but, I was wrong.

after using that feature for a week I now conclude that this new feature sucks and I wanted the previous feature back.

this is the big UX mistake by Youtube that many people like Marques Brownlee understand. let’s look at some points of this update that makes it a mistake.

1. Bad experience for people with low network.

whenever I got a low network, my quality shifts to low and this make user like my anger, yes I can make the high-quality settings as default but I need customization because sometimes I got low networking settings and sometimes high.

2. Takes a long way to change Quality.

No problem with 240p, but the way to change it back to high quality makes the user angry again, as previously you just have to select the quality feature and then select the quality in numbers..

But in this, you have to first go to quality settings to advance settings to select quality. which is a long way..

It takes one extra step but that one step feels annoying when you have to do it many times while using YouTube

3. Low means too-low, High means too-high.

When you just click the data saving quality options it makes the video quality too low (240p) and when you click the high-quality option it moves to (1080p) which’s really annoying.

Yeah, it might be a different scenario with you, as you have different networking factors but considering a wider audience, this feature makes users feel annoying.

Things YouTube should care about.

YouTube has to understand that they are working with a bigger audience and they have to make updates after a lot of research and testing.

You can’t research on people in America and think that it’ll work the same in India, Brazil, etc.

The people are different, situations are different and many other factors are responsible but for better research and user experience any big application has to do this.

Well, YouTube can listen to its users now and can change the quality settings back to old ones.

As sometimes Old is Gold.

Take-Aways

If you’re a UI/UX designer you can take this thing as learning that helps you in understanding your audience in a better way.

The most important thing that can be done is “research” if YouTube did it right it might works better for them.

Lesson: First research, then develop.

I hope you like my point of view on this UX mistake and hope you get some lessons from it.

Thanks for reading, you can read my other articles too.