Like any other Google division, YouTube’s trying some changes (likes to test new features with small groups of people to gain feedback and polish things up) before making them widely available. While a few of them are the opt-in kind and can be accessed through the “Try new features” section from the app settings, many others pop up on their own through server-side switches. One of these experiments on the mobile app now makes it a bit easier to explore new content based on the kind of videos you want to watch.
YouTube began testing a new expandable menu this week that replaces the Explore chip you get at the top of the home page within the Topic bar. Tapping it opens the menu up to reveal Trending and destination pages (Gaming, Music, News, etc.), helping you find content that’s most interesting to you a tiny bit quicker.
YouTube’s trying some changes to the Explore tab:
The Explore tab currently fires up a whole new page with icons for destination pages at the top and Trending videos underneath, but since this page will apparently be done away with, at least from what we can tell, the “Trending” destinations page will be the sole means to discover hot content of all variety (aside from the Shorts page which has its own trending page, but we can discuss that in a different story).
In other words, this change puts a fence between the Explore and Trending sections, eliminating any redundancy between the two.
YouTube says that this new menu UI is currently being tested out with a small percentage of users on iOS and Android. No word yet on rollout plans further out from that point, but it’s likely that everyone will get a piece of this down the line.
