The YouTube Search Bar as Deliberate* Incompetence
On cultural polish and care
I recently came across a video on the numerous design flaws of the YouTube search bar:
Flaws:
- When there is text present in the search bar, the closing "X" overflows into the surrounding region vertically and on the right side.
- The microphone icon is slightly misaligned with the search bar on the vertical axis.
- When the search bar is in an active state, there are two redundant search bar icons (this one is more subjective).
For all the memes that working at Big Tech is just moving buttons around, even the almighty Google has yet to implement a flawless search bar. Keep in mind that Google has a strong incentive to perfect every aspect of the user experience for its 122 million+ daily active users.
As a recovering efficient markets believer, this feels like Google is choosing to walk by a 100 dollar bill every single day and refuse to pick it up.
In this post, I outline possible explanations for why the YouTube search bar is visually flawed, in order of least likely to most likely.
- It's a talent and prioritization issue (extremely unlikely).
Everybody on the YouTube team at Google knows that this is an issue. It's sitting there as a ticket for somebody to fix but is low priority and is continually buried.
The highest quality talent on the YouTube team is only concerned with optimizing the algorithm, both for the primary click and watch portion of the website and YouTube Shorts. Somehow this visual fix is so complicated that you cannot fix this issue without looping in one of these engineers with the context and competence to fix this.
This feels extremely unlikely based on my anecdotal experience as a software engineer and from conversations with engineers who work at Google. There are plenty of agentic designers and engineers who should be able to fix this in a day.
- It's an Easter egg for identifying talent (very unlikely).
Google is known to put Easter eggs throughout their sites for engineers to source talent and for fun.
The YouTube search bar design flaws are another iteration of an Easter egg that sits in plain sight that over a billion people gloss over. I certainly did.
- YouTube has to be backward-compatible with legacy screen types (very unlikely).
Military and medical websites are often visually unappealing due to the practical requirement to always remain backward-compatible with legacy screen types. To be fair, I only tried looking at the search bar on relatively modern monitors and all had the same visual defects.
Perhaps if I tried it on a much older model screen, this would look better. Even so, there is no reason why they can't have specific renderings for screen types. This is something that most major frontend libraries have built-in.
- YouTube is countersignaling to others that they are so dominant that blatant design mistakes don't matter (moderately unlikely).
Google is blatantly countersignaling to the world that they deliberately put bad design into their search bar, and it remains the number one video platform by far. The "mistakes" they make are so minor that any half-decent Silicon Valley startup with good engineering and design principles would fix them.
The YouTube network effect is going on 20 years strong. Google not fixing these flaws serves as a middle finger to all startups trying to A/B test every pixel on their site to displace YouTube.
- YouTube is signaling to users that they don't want you to use the search bar (possible).
YouTube does not care about the aesthetics of the search bar because they want to slowly steer users away from using the search bar. This could be because they are developing an entirely new UI/UX interface for search and the search bar is going to be deprecated in short order anyway.
The best evidence for this is YouTube taking a more opinionated view on search and discovery. YouTube has begun displaying non-sequitur results when you search for a specific video under headings such as "You might also like" or "Top news". Additionally, when a video is full-screen on desktop, scrolling down only shows recommended videos instead of the current video's information and comments.
While users expect to use the search bar to find a specific video, YouTube actively believes that it can find a more engaging video.
If one were to subscribe to Occam's razor, the most likely scenario is that somebody implemented this incorrectly and it sits in the graveyard of tickets that are not high priority enough to allocate engineering cycles to it.
Nothing about the design flaws are necessarily deliberate ex ante, but the energy and resources required to fix the problem are not worth the engineering cycles.
This feels intuitively correct while simultaneously deeply unsatisfying.
If you work on the YouTube team at Google or have any better explanations, please do get in touch.
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