Microtube - I need some opinions from users

[Mister_Magister]

Hello reader

If you are not using microtube, but you’re willing to try it to help me out, you’re even more welcome than people who actually use microtube.

One of the microtube daily users, who has been testing it recently for me, pointed out that either they’re getting old or the features of microtube are confusing. This question would be better asked after I release next update but well I can fix issues now before releasing.

So the question is, what do you think about UX (user experience) of microtube? Do you find anything confusing? Hard to find? Any weird behaviour (from your point of view)?

For example when you go to subscriptions page and click on channel it loads videos from that channel to main video list, but if you click on channel in search results or under video it opens channel page with videos from the channel. Is that confusing to you? Or that the trending videos are loaded to the main video list same as subscriptions, or channel videos? Is it confusing that when autoplay is on, after video ends, it goes to the first recommended video from the video list under the video on the video page?

My opinion is absolutely useless because i know perfectly well how everything works and why so i have to ask you guys for help. Especially people who are not experienced with microtube are the most valuable and if you would give it to someone who never used sfos that would be even better.

I hope I get some answers

[kan_ibal]

The main issue of microtube is unreliable work of search and playing. Sometime is working, sometime not.

[Mister_Magister]

that’s not what i asked about.

[turmelus1]

I think it’s mostly pretty clear, though comments might be nice to read while watching the video. Maybe the description of video could be where the comments are now? Or what Newpipe is doing, video plays in all 3 sections, comments, video suggestions and description.
Also, video description seems to be missing date of video, which is a bit annoying since sometimes video thumbnail shows uploaded “in 81 years” and when that happens I have no idea when the video was uploaded.

[turmelus1]

Also I’m not a fan of video autoplaying at all, I like to manually play every video.

[Mister_Magister]

(you can literally turn it off in settings)

[turmelus1]

Sorry, I didn’t mean autoplay next video, I meant autoplay at the beginning of video when I click the video thumbnail. There is a bit of delay with play starting and since it always shows the play button I automatically often just press it and when I do that before autoplay has started playing the video, playback will never start unless I refresh the page.

[Mister_Magister]

it’s because it’s loading and you pressing it just causes more harm than good i should just remove the play button

[turmelus1]

I realize that it’s loading, thats’s one of the reasons I don’t like autoplay in general. I’m just saying that this is a thing I don’t have to worry about on youtube or newpipe. No disrespect, you are doing a great job and I’m glad my reliance of android is diminishing.

[nephros]

Agreed, that is the one thing I that confuses me every time.

[smatkovi]

I just got used to it that i don’t touch the play button until the video starts playing

[thigg]

You didnt ask for that, but thanks for creating and maintaining a native youtubeclient. I imagine it is a very annoying thing to get everything working right.

unfortunatley i do not have any good ux feedback for you asides of “its not working sometimes”

[Mister_Magister]

You guys will be happy to know that next version is so incredibly stable it crashes lipstick instead, so please, enough

[smatkovi]

Thanks for the only working YouTube client with adblock and even sponsorblock. That’s more than one gets on android or ios

[babo]

There’s sponserblock in revanced youtube on android, just fyi.
I agree, its a great app. Nice features, with a clean(ish) UI.
I’d suggest maybe moving sponserblock button somewhere else (settings pulley menu perhaps?), as it seems a bit out of place. I’ve missed it & didnt even realize its there until after a few days of installing the app(maybe its only me though).

[247]

They have been fixed, just wait for next update (out when it’s ready ofc)

[Mister_Magister]

I moved it around in settings because i agree it was hard to read them, now its under player settings and should be much simpler

[tuplasuhveli]

NewPipe user here, I decided to give Microtube a chance to see, if I can be of help. I wish I had more time to test the app, but this was the best I could do in a fairly short time. There’s a lot of good to say about the app, but since you are looking for constructive criticism, I didn’t include anything else in this post. Hope you understand!

First thing that confused me a little: there is a separate search page you can open by swiping right. There is no indicator on the default page of that, so that was a bit of a surprise. The second time I was confused was when I tried to do a search on that page. After doing the search I waited for quite some time, swiped back to the default page and there were the search results!

After fiddling around, I realised that those two are not different pages, but rather two different views with different functionalities of the same page. Maybe it would be more intuitive to have two different pages for two totally different functionalities?

I chose my default category to be “Subscriptions”. Now, when I do a search on the default page, how can I return back to the original subscriptions listing? I would have expected clearing the search to do the trick. I tried everything I could think of, but restaring the app was the only solution I found.

One small wrinkle I found was that skipping by double-tap is possible only in a landscape mode. I watch some videos, where I need to follow the description along the video and I would have found it helpful to do the skipping in portrait mode as well. This also gave me an idea for a feature request: what would you think about adding a “custom skip length” in the settings, under the playback options?

To answer directly to your questions:

For example when you go to subscriptions page and click on channel it loads videos from that channel to main video list, but if you click on channel in search results or under video it opens channel page with videos from the channel. Is that confusing to you?

I find the latter to be more intuitive behaviour, so it’s mildly confusing to my eye.

Or that the trending videos are loaded to the main video list same as subscriptions, or channel videos?

I didn’t experience this type of behaviour, but I would prefer to keep my subscriptions apart from any other content.

Is it confusing that when autoplay is on, after video ends, it goes to the first recommended video from the video list under the video on the video page?

I find this to be perfectly logical.

[Mister_Magister]

@tuplasuhveli

First thing that confused me a little: there is a separate search page you can open by swiping right. There is no indicator on the default page of that, so that was a bit of a surprise. The second time I was confused was when I tried to do a search on that page. After doing the search I waited for quite some time, swiped back to the default page and there were the search results!

Currently (as in upcoming update) by accident, when you open microtube, there’s animation that’s swiping right to the video list so that should be enough indicator. I also made it so that when you search you’re taken back from the categories list and queue to the main list/search results

@tuplasuhveli

After fiddling around, I realised that those two are not different pages, but rather two different views with different functionalities of the same page. Maybe it would be more intuitive to have two different pages for two totally different functionalities?

nah, this is good, whole separate page just to load categories would be overkill and too complicated, this is good once you get used to it

@tuplasuhveli

I chose my default category to be “Subscriptions”. Now, when I do a search on the default page, how can I return back to the original subscriptions listing? I would have expected clearing the search to do the trick. I tried everything I could think of, but restaring the app was the only solution I found.

literally go to the subscriptions page? That’s first thing I would think of, its below settings. Subscriptions category was introduced much later than subscriptions and all it does is load all videos cause people were tired of loading them manually.

@tuplasuhveli

One small wrinkle I found was that skipping by double-tap is possible only in a landscape mode. I watch some videos, where I need to follow the description along the video and I would have found it helpful to do the skipping in portrait mode as well. This also gave me an idea for a feature request: what would you think about adding a “custom skip length” in the settings, under the playback options?

Both can be done. Generally i like to leave out gestures and most of the features to landscape to not clutter the tiny view.

@tuplasuhveli

but I would prefer to keep my subscriptions apart from any other content.

it’s just video list

[ohnonot]

Microtube requires a Google API key, yes?