Want to try YouTube’s Carousel Look? Then do this

It seems like Google is constantly trying out new designs and testing them on the live side by randomly selecting a percentage of the user base. The latest design that is currently making the round is YouTube’s carousel design which changes the frontpage in a fundamental way.

I need to point out right away that this is only working for me if I’m not logged in on the site. Once I log in, the frontpage changes to the old design which stays there until I log out again at which point the new carousel design comes onto the screen again.

Before we look at how you can activate the new design on your computer, you are probably interested in how it looks like once you have activated it. Take a look at the screenshot below to find out.

What you basically get here is a full screen view of video recommendations. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure where your own video stream and subscriptions would fit in here, but would say that they are added somehow to the stream dynamically.

The design itself looks optimized for small screen devices, probably with touch, as it is making the selection process a lot easier on the screen.

To test out the new design you need to do the following in your web browser of choice:

• In Google Chrome, open YouTube.com, and press Shift-Ctrl-J
• In Firefox, open YouTube, and press Shift-Ctrl-K
• In Opera, open YouTube, press Ctrl-Shift-i, and switch to Console
• In Internet Explorer, open YouTube, press F12 to open the web developer toolbar, and switch to Console

Paste the following code into the form and hit enter. In Chrome you should get an undefined message and see that the frontpage is switched right to the new carousel design.

document.cookie="VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=eKxEWQ3xcc8; path=/; domain=.youtube.com";window.location.reload();

When you are done testing and want to switch back to YouTube’s old page design, you can either delete all cookies that the site has stored on your computer, or log in which also gets rid of the design for the time being. Check out the excellent Web Browser Maintenance guide over at Loginhelper for information on how to clear the cache and cookies in your browser of choice.

Do you like the new homepage layout?