YouTube Community Curation
My Role:
Product Designer –– Facilitation, Research, Interaction Design, Visual Design, Prototyping
Overview
A study & concept piece focused on empowering users with enhanced content curation and playback while bringing community to the front.
HIGHLIGHTS
Objective
To consolidate highly visible design debt that the YouTube platform has amassed given its rapid growth and massive amounts of video content that is hampered by inefficient means of curation.
Part exercise, part labor of love, I took up the task of researching, analyzing, and conceptualizing solutions, with the goal of testing with users and publishing my findings.
Critical areas
From the workshop, we identified 4 high impact streams that when optimizing for one key persona would lead to the most growth and serve as a pathway for onboarding the other personas. These solution streams were:
Homepage video feed
Directory searching on issues, people, events, and committees should be prioritized and improved throughout the platform.
Content queue
The marketing page should indicate the product is accessible, free secure, and ready to be used by Junior Staffers, but not exclusively.
Viewer interest categories
When a congressional staffer is searched for online, their Dome profile should be among the first page search results, like Yelp is for restaurants.
Content continuity
Staffers are often shadowing their bosses throughout the Hill and don’t always have access to a computer to access our networking/directory tools.
RESEARCH PHASE
Mapping out a treasure trove of
valuable information
My messy journaling system to catalogue key pieces of information
Quantitative research
At the beginning of the project I created a quick overview of not only my assumptions about the platform, but knee-jerk solutions. I did this to catch not only my bias, but also ideas that may have gone by the wayside had they not been brainstormed in a vacuum. The benefit being that I I could later assess them in light of proper research and could even integrate any ideas that were still valid.
After noting my own assumptions, I gathered proper research from interviewing users, compiling feedback from across the web and Google’s own robust user & platform data. This allowed me to compare YouTube’s own thinking and strategy behind their decisions, to the experience of their users, and not rethread paths they had already iterated upon.
“On YouTube, we’re now seeing more browsing
than searching behavior”
Josh Lewandowski
UX Research Manager @ YouTube
Come to Learn New Things
not just entertainment
use YouTube to Solve a Problem
when it comes to work, school, & hobbies
Data gathered directly from Google & YouTube’s publicly shared research
User surveys
A novel change in user behavior marked as early as 2017 has seen individuals no longer satisfied with passive content consumption, but desiring rich interactions.
This meant that YouTube’s initial distinction between passive and active users were blurring, despite the platform still catering to passive users.
Feedback across the web
User’s complaints often revolved around the recommendation algorithm being inconsistent on the homepage and in searches.
On the homepage, the selection of videos were erratic, switching between a single interest from the user, a hodgepodge of interests, or entirely irrelevant videos.
When users would search for a video, there’d be a lack of nuance for why a video was chosen, often being more about popularity than about the search keywords.
Next, once they had found a video, the recommendations were often highly related to the first search term rather than continuations on the topic or they would be completely unrelated to the videos they were watching.
Lastly, the largest complaint I found was a lack of continuity for accessing further videos without interrupting your current viewing. At the time of this research there were no q ueueing or continuity options except via mobile devices when streaming to TV.
Qualitative interviews
I conducted interviews with 10 users over video calls, in-person, email/forum discussions to get an understanding of their experiences and pain points using the platform. Following are an excerpt of the questions I asked.
Questions
How often do you use YouTube?
What devices do you use YouTube on? (TV, Mobile, Desktop)
What do you use the platform for? Learning? Entertainment?
How do you feel about your recommended content feed?
How varied is the content you consume?
How do you feel about the visibility of your subscriptions?
Do you have YouTube Premium? What would you pay to have as features?
Key feedback gathered
Recommended/Related videos were often irrelevant to what they wanted to watch
Channels they had subscribed to and activated alerts for were not showing up on their feed
Couldn’t search or browse while a video was playing
ADs & promoted content (like movies) dominated a lot of spaceHomepage felt messy & repetitive
No pop-out window (PiP)
Can’t choose to play videos in a sequence (Queue) or what Autoplays next
Exploring content curation interactions powered by users and communities
Objective
Bringing subscription visibility, fresh content discovery paths, robust curation options, as well as continuity across the platform for both passive and active users.
To consolidate highly visible design debt that the YouTube platform has amassed given its rapid growth and massive amounts of video content that is hampered by inefficient means of curation.
Part exercise, part labor of love, I took up the task of researching, analyzing, and conceptualizing solutions, with the goal of testing with users and publishing my findings.
From the workshop, we identified 4 high impact streams that when optimizing for one key persona would lead to the most growth and serve as a pathway for onboarding the other personas. These solution streams were:
Homepage video feed
Directory searching on issues, people, events, and committees should be prioritized and improved throughout the platform.
Content queue
The marketing page should indicate the product is accessible, free secure, and ready to be used by Junior Staffers, but not exclusively.
Viewer interest categories
When a congressional staffer is searched for online, their Dome profile should be among the first page search results, like Yelp is for restaurants.
Content continuity
Staffers are often shadowing their bosses throughout the Hill and don’t always have access to a computer to access our networking/directory tools.
Silas 2024
Made in Durham