For over a year, YouTube Music has been testing several new designs for the Now Playing screen on Android and iOS.
Compared to the current stable interface, the new design uses icons to toggle “Song” and “Video,” making it clearer and cleaner, and superior to previous versions that removed this option entirely and replaced it with a button at the bottom of the menu.
This toggle has been in YouTube Music for a long time, and removing it would have affected the user’s motor memory and would have diminished the value of the music video library.
This design did not modify the slider, controls, or bottom playlist, but the bar became rounded and the playback indicator was missing. When you scroll actively, the font becomes thicker, which is a nice update in keeping with the main YouTube interface.
The biggest change concerns the three signs at the bottom of the screen. Only one tag, “Up Next,” has been retained, which has been renamed based on the album, playlist, or mix being listened to. Google removed the Lyrics and Related tags, so the latter can be accessed by clicking on the song name.
The functionality of displaying lyrics has been moved to the slider, where it sometimes appears after the like or dislike button, and in other designs as a fourth element partially off the screen. The first design is better due to its frequent use.
This update allows for a dual view that combines controls and queue, which is a good idea, but requires moving other frequently used parts of the app.
The past few days have seen this design appear to more users, but it has not yet been released on a large scale. Users hope that YouTube Music has settled on this design and that the A/B tests that began last November will be completed.
