YouTube Layouts
Redesigning YouTube experience by empowering users with customization feature
date.
role.
tools.
April 2021 - August 2021
Design researcher /
Visual + UX Designer
Figma / Adobe Illustrator /
Adobe Photoshop
overview
Problem
YouTube has become an integral platform not only for entertaining videos but also as an information hub of the global internet community. As user demographics become highly diversified, there must be new demands for user experience enhancement.
Solution
An additional feature that presents relevant options to personalize the user experience, controlling the quantity and category of information that the users are exposed to.
research
The assumption of demand for enhancement of user experience came from these statistical results.
According to Statista, 72.8% of internet users in the U.S. use YouTube as of the third quarter of 2020.
That is the majority of the internet users, which must be a group with high diversity, diversity in the purpose of using the platform.
USER INTERVIEWS
To figure out the overall sentiment, user interviews were conducted, asking:
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Purpose and level of reliance on YouTube
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Behaviors before, while and after using YouTube
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Emotions and thoughts
As shown in the affinity map, overall sentiments towards the YouTube experience were positive.
Highly relying on the platform for various purposes in daily basis
Using the platform for learning purpose as much as entertainment purpose
Desktop is more preferred than mobile for screen size, but happy about the accessibility of both
Highly diverse contents
Algorithm-driven UX (such as recommended videos) sometimes make users to feel their privacy is violated
There are overwhelming amount of contents definitely need validation
It is lacking organization function for saved and subscribed content. It only has just a few of those tools.
UI is complicated that needs some improvement.
However, some shared pain points were addressed from the interviews as well.
"Since the contents are not validated, I am hesitant to show my kids any video on YouTube."
– Pastor / Teacher, 35 year-old, father of two sons
"I am concerned about getting influenced by algorithm-driven navigation."
– Undergrad student, 21 year old
"I am getting overwhelmed when too many videos are suggested and automatically playing on my feed."
– Developer, 31 year-old.
DIVING DEEPER INTO THE PAIN POINTS...
Through interviews, four main pain points are identified, and two of them are about UI improvement. The other two, however, are negative sentiments about the platform's service itself:
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Algorithm-driven user experience is harmful and overwhelming, as much as its convenience.
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There is an overwhelming amount of content that needs validation.
For these two pain points, I was curious if these are relevant problems for global users as well.
According to YouTube Regrets, a study conducted by Mozilla, 71% of the videos reported as harmful were from AI-driven recommendations of the platform. In addition to that, recommended videos were 40% more likely to be reported as harmful content while, according to CNET, users are spending 70% of their time on the platform with the lead of the recommendation system.
It was worse in case for the countries do not have English as a primary language: the rate of harmful content reports were 60% higher in those countries.
Why is that so? According to the study, harmful content attracts more views per day by 70% on average than other videos.
From a business standpoint, YouTube wants users to spend more time on the platform, so the algorithm would naturally recommend trending content, regardless of its validity and safety.
Recommendations represent 71% of the regretted videos reported.
And YouTube is currently working very hard to minimize the exposure of harmful content by establishing Community Guidelines and its enforcement.
For transparency, YouTube releases Community Guidelines Enforcement Report quarterly, including data point such as Violative View Rate.
The gap between the above study and YouTube's current effort for user protection shows that YouTube's current AI-driven user experience has reached its limit for both fulfilling the company's business and ethical needs and resolving users' concerns.
Then what can we do now to resolve the pain points while not hurting the business?
To figure out the solutions, I created a persona who has concerns with the above pain points but still wants to enjoy the platform on daily basis.
PERSONA
Irene is a newly married and remote-working developer. Since she is spending most of her time, she uses YouTube daily as background noise and music. Also, YouTube is her main source of entertainment and learning material for her hobby.
However, she is often overwhelmed by the number of suggested videos. She is also concerned about the content of the suggestions since it is often misrepresenting her areas of interest. Moreover, she is having a hard time managing content she found and saved for future usage.
How might we grant more control to Irene on exploring YouTube?
MVP
2x2 MATRIX
During ideation, features that would give Irene the ability to customize her own experience emerged.
For MVP, the personalization survey and corresponding homepage layout options were decided to be created in desktop version only, following the learning from the user interviews.
USER FLOWS
prototyping
IDEATION
LO-FI WIREFRAME
iterations...
USABILITY TESTING
Users were given two tasks:
Task 1
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Change homepage to be search-oriented layout
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Add search shortcut in search-oriented layout
Task 2
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Create a custom dashboard layout
The results were devastating.
Overall, users were confused about the concept of the MVP and didn't quite understand what they went through even after completion.
LEARNINGS
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The MVP needs to be redefined since it is covering a broad range of features in shallow depth.
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The user interface is not so intuitive, that people are having a hard time understanding what it is about.
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Onboarding instructions are required to introduce the new features.
REVISED MVP & WIREFRAME
The MVP was narrowed down to focus only on two layout options (Search Engine layout and Customized Dashboard layout) more in-depth.
As user testing continues, a few more steps are added to each layout experience for enhanced intuitiveness of the UI.
WIREFRAME REVISION 01
WIREFRAME REVISION 02
prototype
MENU: LAYOUTS
Change layout to select preferred way to explore the platform
SEARCH ENGINE LAYOUT
Get exposed to searched content only
CUSTOMIZED DASHBOARD LAYOUT
Customize the dashboard to control YouTube recommendations
WHAT'S NEXT?
There is still a lot more to explore with YouTube Layouts. The current MVP is covering only the beginning of the user journey: setting up the preferred layout. What other layout presets would Irene need? And what other functions can be derived to amplify the distinct user experience of each layout? I set up a few next steps to answer these questions.
01 SUBSCRIPTIONS FOCUSED LAYOUT
First, I will work on building another layout option, Subscriptions Focused Layout, since one of Irene's pain points was about managing subscribed channels. As of 2021, there are more than 37 million YouTube channels out there, and the categories of those channels are highly diverse. This layout option will be focusing on organizing subscriptions and the corresponding content effectively.
02 FROM THE BEGINNING TO THE END
Each layout option is created to provide a distinctly different user experience of choice. That means each of them will need specific tools that will support the intended user experience, for example, bookmarks of videos as one of the content management tools that will be used outside of a navigation-to-watch cycle.
03 MOBILE!
According to YouTube, 70% of all traffic comes from mobile devices as of 2019. Each layout should be adjusted due to the dramatic size difference from the web version. I also need to do additional research to determine if some of the layout options would be still relevant on mobile devices.
