You Tube has finally gotten around to rolling out its redesign to the world at large, moving from a long running opt-in beta test affair to a more unified site design.

Smart move, changing everything on April Fools Day...

YouTube announced at the beginning of this year that there was a fairly heavy-duty bit of work being done on its video service that would see the page redesigned substantially so that the various pages that users encounter (between browsing profiles, their own homepages and videos) would seem more like one big service, rather than a series of pages with different layouts. It’s a bit of a shift, and one that does indeed help make things seem a little more uniform, but it’s also fairly likely that there will be complaints about the new look for YouTube.

The fact is that, while things have been moved to sensible locations, any change is going to take time to get used to, and moving the “Subscribe” button from its old home on the top right to a spot just below a video’s title might well result in more subscriptions in the long-run, but for the moment, there’s no telling how many people will glance around for it, not see it immediately, and forget about the whole business.

Similarly, there have been complaints made about the fact that YouTube is dropping the ability to give things an ‘out of five stars’ rating, instead moving towards a “like” “dislike” option. The information box having been moved down from the right hand side to a wider bar just below the video itself hasn’t been too widely commented on yet, but we’re sure some will find fault with it.

Still, it might be time to question the wisdom of rolling out major changes to a web-based service so that most of your users will encounter them for the first time on April first…