I recently made a video about
Madelbulber2 fractal surface animations and had to deal with the YouTube user interface for the first time since last year. I don't really remember how the old YouTube interface used to work, but I feel that they have really tried to silo everything related to video creation in a separate domain that is well-isolated from the interface for viewing videos. Looking for a way to delete a video that I had uploaded to YouTube, I clicked on the "Your videos" tab in the left side navigation panel:
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Note: due to a bug in the "new" Blogger, the blue "YOUTUBE STUDIO" button is cut off
near the upper right corner of the above image.
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As shown above, this is a list of my uploaded videos, the most recent first. In this era in which user controls are routinely hidden from users, you have to hover over a video to see the user controls (see image to the right).
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weird icons
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In this case, all you get three little meaningless icons. The first (an analog clock) might not even be recognized by some people in this digital age. It "obviously" means "watch later". The second icon I imagine is meant to be a list. It is to "add to queue". How that differs from "watch later" I have no idea. I've never used either of these "controls" for my videos. The third hidden control is the ubiquitous three dots vertical ellipsis which means "more of the same". What might that mean in this context? ...watch later, add to queue, remind me to watch, I'll watch in my second life, bucket list of unwatched videos... no, just kidding.
Actually, in this case, I fantasized that there might be an "edit video" or "delete this video" option for each of my videos. Silly me. The popup list of "additional" options includes the two that are already displayed just above on your screen plus
ONE additional new option, "Save to playlist". We all ask: why didn't they just show the "Save to playlist" icon in the first place? Answer: because users always want to have to click twice when they could have clicked just once. 🤷
My search for a delete option continued. I'll shorten the story because I did not know to click on the blue "YOUTUBE STUDIO" button. However, I now know that if you click on that button then you get a whole "new" set of tabs along the left side of your screen. The default is "Dashboard" which fills your screen with all kinds of useless information. However there are other tabs including one for "Videos". {... but I was just in the page for my videos... ???? No, silly human, you were in
one of your pages for your videos, not the RIGHT
ONE!}
If you click on the "Videos" tab then you get yet another list of your videos! (see below)
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| fail-safe delete |
Then if you know to click in one of the little check boxes, more hidden controls appear (the black bar appears with choices "Edit", "Add to playlist" and "Other actions".) If, in desperation, you use the "Other actions" drop-down then you finally get to see "Delete forever" as an option. No less than six mouse clicks through a series of hidden controls in order to reach what I think must be one of the most commonly used features of YouTube. Well played, YouTube, well played.
