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YouTube - Wiggly Wobbly Blobs?

Written by on December 19, 2007

As you have probably seen, YouTube has changed the way it visualizes related videos. Instead of a nice list, that you can understand, they have created a bunch of blobs?

Now you have to move your mouse over each blob... wait for it to animate, and display a huge bunch of extra blobs - wait some more for them to align to each other... and then, perhaps, you are lucky to see a video that might look interesting (in most cases you will not be so lucky).

Needless to say, this kind of interaction is called "Mystery Meat Navigation" and is known to be the number one thing "YOU SHOULD NOT DO" in terms of "interaction design" and usability.

While there are 10 million ways to screw up your navigation, the best way to screw it up is to use Mystery Meat Navigation

- Vincent Flanders

It is so incredible inefficient. You spend 20 times as long time seeing 20 times less content. Sure there are a lot of blobs, but try mousing over many of them and you end up with this:

BTW: The worst part of this, besides being just generally awful, is that when you mouse over a large number of blobs, the time it takes increases exponentially. Try it - and watch you screen shake and wobble forever.

There is so many ways that this could be done better... Sure we all want to create Rich Media Experiences, but this is not it!

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Thomas Baekdal

Thomas Baekdal

Founder of Baekdal, author, writer, strategic consultant, and new media advocate.

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