Here’s a collection of the best video player UI design inspiration and tips on things to think about when designing them.
Related: 7 Best Music Player UI Design Inspiration
The growing popularity of Video Player UI
The world seems to be moving towards video as a preferred format, as it feels more real and engaging than still images. On the internet, video content can be more engaging than text, with animations, video footage, and a person speaking to you. This can be noticed in the rise of popularity of YouTube videos, Instagram reels, and TikTok in recent years. Many young people also seem to be more comfortable listening to someone deliver a message than reading a long text about it.
A consequence of the rise in popularity of videos is the demand for designers to work with video-based interfaces, websites, and apps. Designers need to be able to design video player UI components. To help in this task, I’ve curated this post with good video player UI design inspirations, as well as some design tips.
Tips for designing a video player UI
The basic structure and layout of a video player is quite similar in most design cases. You need a viewable screen and settings to navigate the video with. Buttons and settings are usually set to the sides and bottom of the viewable screen. However, there are some details in a video player UI design that can make a video player component look a bit more polished, clean, and improve the user experience.
Here are some examples of elements that can improve the design of a video player:
- Make elements (e.g., play button, sound bar, pop-ups) that are overlaying the video image as non-intrusive as possible. This makes more room for the video and makes the overall look less distracting
- One method of achieving that is to use an opaque/translucent background on overlays. Any graphical elements that are secondary can have a lower opacity in order to take less visual attention
- You can also utilize the use of icons instead of text
- You can add the functionality of time:d comments (comments that are placed at a specific timestamp on the vieo). A real-life example is the comment section on Soundcloud, which makes listeners feel like they are listening in real-time with other people
- This can improve community and user engagement, and in turn, the user experience
- On desktop, it can be a really nice function to see the comment section on the side of the video (especially if the comments are live)
- Allow the user to dismiss or hide on-screen elements that they do not wish to be seen (e.g. subtitles, floating comments and elements, notifications, information).
- Make sure that the touch-targets are big enough. This is in order to make sure that user’s can comfortable use their fingers to navigate all objects. Otherwise, it can often lead to frustration.
- There are general size guidelines for buttons that you can follow, such as to make sure that touch-targets are a minimum of 44px or 10mm.
Desktop Video Player UI Design
Dark Mode
Sajjad Mohammadi Nia – In this example, we can see both the implementation of using opaque/translucent backgrounds, as well as a minimal style on overlays. In cases like this, where the UI elements are so stripped-down, you want to especially make sure that the touch-areas are big enough.
Dwinawan – In desktop video screen UIs, elements such as live chat and comments can be placed on the side of the video to make it less disruptive. On mobile devices, I’d recommend allowing the user to hide chat overlays to allow for full experience of viewing the video.
Alien Pixels – When the user has paused the video, you can overlay the screen with relevant or promotional elements. Since the video isn’t in an active mode, they won’t experience disturbance by this. But I would not recommend you to overlay too much promotional content on videos that are playing, since that often just disrupts the viewing experience.
Light mode
Przemek Kowal – Here’s an example of comments that are attached to a specific timestamp, which can be a fun and engaging feature for users.
Nick Tarasov – In the future, it would be cool if we could have interactive overlays on videos such as in the design below.
Mobile Video Player UI Design
Designing video player interfaces for mobile screens is more challenging than designing for desktops since you are working with a more limited amount of space.
- Overlaying elements on top of the video can easily make the user frustrated, accidentally click wrong, or feel like they aren’t able to view the content as they wish. On mobile devices, I’d therefore recommend making sure that non-essential overlays are easy to dismiss or hide. For example, you can allow users to tap on the screen to hide all overlays.
- Another feature I’ve observed in recent times is the use of a clickable list of content for videos. This is an idea I think has been borrowed from how books often have a first page of an overview of the content, which allows the user to skip to what interests them. You could implement this in video content that is educational or dividable into sections of topics.
Inspiration:
I hope this could give you some good video player UI design inspiration!