YouTube Timeline Scrub Redesign

Jon Nemargut
2 min readMar 15, 2017

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The timeline scrubber on YouTube is incredibly simple to use. Click the current location in the timeline and drag it to where you want to go.

Desktop timeline

At least, this is simple on the desktop. The current time target is small and you have a handy mouse that can deal with such a small target. On a phone, however, that small size becomes a hassle.

iPhone timeline

Sure. YouTube made the current time target size a little bigger and they also conveniently made it so you can double tap the left and the right side of the screen to skip 10 seconds. But that’s still not enough.

The whole screen is at our disposal. So why not take advantage of it?

Full screen scrub

In this mockup the current time can be shown via a red vertical line on the screen and a user can scrub their time forward and backward.

To make it even more convenient we can add in time to the left and right of the vertical line.

Time on top of video

Let me know your thoughts.

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