YouTube rolls out a fresh redesign – here’s what’s new

YouTube is rolling out a new redesign to add color and new functionality to the platform on mobile, web, and smart TVs.

The company revealed its latest design updates in a blog post on its website earlier this week. The redesign includes several new features aimed at improving the user experience on the app.

Additionally, the platform is being revamped to bring more color into the picture. And it does that with the introduction of ambient mode for mobile, web, and smart TVs.

Ambient mode uses “dynamic color sampling” to bring the color effects of videos you’re watching to the background of the app when using its dark theme.

You’ll start to see the color of the video you’re watching bleed into the app itself. The platform is also making its dark theme even darker to show off those colors even more.

New features coming to YouTube’s video player

Adding color is just the beginning of the new YouTube redesign. The platform is revamping the page underneath the videos you’re watching.

Now, links in the description of videos will be transformed into buttons. And the familiar like, share, download, and save buttons have been changed to a pill-shaped icon underneath videos.

Finally, the platform is adding the long-awaited pinch-to-zoom and precise seeking features that it has been testing this year.

Pinch-to-zoom will let you zoom in on videos on your iOS or Android device. You can let go of the pinch and the video will continue to play in the zoomed-in setting.

With precise seeking, you have even more control than before when looking for certain parts of a video.

Dragging or swiping up while seeking will bring up a row of thumbnails from the video so you can easily navigate to the part of the video you’re looking for.

YouTube started rolling these features out to users earlier this week. But don’t panic if you don’t see any of them on your devices quite yet.

These features tend to roll out gradually, and that is the case with this YouTube redesign, too. The updates will roll out over the next few weeks, so keep your eye out for YouTube’s new look.

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