Yahoo just rolled out the second iteration of their video offering. The first version came last year when the search giant launched, yep, you guessed it, a video searching service. The new version adds video hosting, partner content, and community features like rating and sharing. This relaunch puts Yahoo squarely on the playing field with YouTube, Google Video, and the literally dozens of other video services that have popped up in the last year.
What's to like about this offering? First and foremost, it doesn't look dreadful. Yahoo has eschewed the text and link heavy style so popular at many other video sites (and Yahoo's own Flickr photo site as well,) and made a site that you may actually want to look at -- if you like "Yahoo purple" that is :-)
Second, they've focused on making commonly accessed features actually accessible. Imagine that. The pages are uncrowded and important features get the real estate they deserve.
Right up at the top of all of the Yahoo video pages sits one of the most useful and presumably the most used features, a great big (and nicely highlighted in yellow,) search field. The size and location is a big usability win and a welcome improvement over other services where key features like search are often crammed into tiny spaces off in the corners of the page to make more room for great big "tag clouds" or similarly unfriendly tools.
The central portion of the main Video page is devoted to three highlighted videos, the top "Featured", "Popular", and "New" videos. Each one includes a decent sized video still that links to the player page and well placed information about the clip.
Under the three highlighted videos, you get to the meat of the page and and a nice (but flawed) menu for "Featured", "Popular", "Categories", and "Tags".
Selecting either of Featured or Popular gives you just what you'd expect, a listing of the top featured or popular videos. The video listings are very clean and easy to use with plenty of room for a linked video still, the title and a short description, clear text and graphic indicators for popularity, and a simple link to channel and source information (since not all videos are actually hosted at yahoo. More on that later.)
Selecting either of Category or Tag gives a listing of available categories and tags. After selecting a specific category or tag, the you get a listing of the top 10 videos in that category. The Category listing seems a bit skimpy and the Tags listing is equally weak but I imagine (hope) that will improve with time.
The biggest problem with navigation through these four listings is that the browser back button gives inconsistent results. If, for example, you go to the Tags listing and follow the links to a video page and then hit back, rather than returning to Tags listing, you're taken to the front page. I'm all for good looks but basic navigation has to work.
There are a few other oddities in the video listings. The first is that the Featured and Popular results don't offer the standard "previous and next" link navigation that we're all familiar with and expect. The Category listings and the Tag listings (as well as the video search results list) do offer this standard bit of navigation. This is ameliorated somewhat by the "More Featured Videos" link in the page footer, but we're still left with nothing for the Popular video results and a very inconsistent user experience.
Another inconsistency is that the search results list doesn't show the same columns as all of the other results. It's missing the popularity colum and includes a handy Duration column listing the clip length and format -- something I'd like to see in the default for all video lists.
The back navigation bug needs to be fixed and these other inconsistencies seems arbitrary and completely unnecessary. Other than those problems, which shouldn't be difficult to correct, the video results listing is pretty nice, going for usability rather than quantity.
The video player page is mostly typical and fairly well organized. Underneath the ubiquitous site navigation and the excellent big search field you can find the video player with its nice large graphic controls. Sharing the video is made easy with the click of an email or IM button to the right of the player controls. The other key community features, saving and sharing are accessible from large controls directly below the video.
To the right of the video player sits all of the video metada. Yahoo has done a decent job organizing this section, putting the most important information in nice large bold fonts above the fold.
The downside for the player page is that it doesn't use that nifty Ajaxy goodness to keep the video playing while you interact with the page. If you want to save the video to your Yahoo Favorites, you're taken off the page and into your Favorites page. If you click the stars to rate the video, the player stops and the page reloads to show your rating. The same goes for emailing or listing the full set of applicable tags. You're kicked out of the video experience when there's just no need.
Videos, even over broadband, can take some time to load and tossing the us of the page when we try to interact is just unacceptable. What's strange is that Yahoo put some time into optimizing the experience for less important tasks. Updating a profile or deleting a video from your collection gives nice Ajax information/confirmation dialogs that don't force you through a page reload. Let's hope they spend some time streamlining the video player page experience.
Besides not being horribly ugly, Yahoo Video has another major distinguishing feature: it isn't just a hosting service. Yahoo video is aggregation service of sorts. Yahoo has combined its Web video indexing and searching service, this new community video hosting system, and content from the growing list of Yahoo media partnerships to give users a rich hybrid experience that offers a lot of quality content.
The up side to this aggregation and indexing approach is that Yahoo provides a lot of content and a very consistent experience for these diverse content sources all the way up until the point you launch the actual video. This means that you can take advantage of most of the Yahoo features, saving the video, emailing it, rating, and reviewing regardless of where the video is actually hosted. The down side is that this can be a bit jarring when you go to actually watch videos. Sometimes the video plays right there in the page, sometimes you're forced to other Yahoo pages, sometimes you're sent to a partner site and other times you're tossed to some random site out on the Web. At a bare minimum, Yahoo should be able to integrate their own video content and Yahoo partner content into Yahoo video pages.
I'm already a fan of Yahoo Video for giving users an experience that doesn't look like it was designed for engineers. and the overall look and feel as well as the placement of key pieces of information and interaction are definitely moving the video experience in a better direction that what I've seen at the other, text heavy and cluttered, video hosting sites. There are still a few big glitches in usability though, the scattered bits of Ajax not withstanding, and I hope that the next version addresses some of these problem -- especially where users are yanked away from their primary tasks (watching and interacting with the video).
