Evaluate this popular app from UI, UX and features. This article serves as an outline of my own observations and learning from various redesign and review articles for YouTube.
Value of the App
Purpose of the product:
Have users spend more time on the App, browsing through more content and end up watching more Ads.
Approaches to Accomplish the Objective:
- ML based content recommendation
2. Recommending YouTube Mix playlist
3. De-emphasizing Comments on Mobile
Competitors on the Market
Netflix，Vimeo, AiQiyi
Interaction Design
Summary:
- Displaying 2 videos/screen to help training better ML algorithm and eliminate choice phobia.
- Improvement: Need to support background audio playing
Summary:
- In order to attract more traffic to new media content, the current YouTube App put [comments] section at the very bottom, which is hard for new user to discover. Improvement Suggestion: Use tabbed navigation to switch between recommendations of “Up Next” and “Comments” of current video that encourage users to participate.
- Improvement: Enable playing a video on loop
- 82% users start browsing YouTube with a search. Improvement: Introduce a bigger bolder search bar in the header on all screens.
Summary:
- Introduce horizontal scroll to unlock more real estate
- Combine “Share” and “Add to” icons to avoid unnecessary repetition.
My Discovery:
- New features like double tap to rewind and fast forward gives affinity with the product. It would be great to provide more clear indicator to fast forward or rewind a video through on-boarding screens or visual hint in the app.
- Controlling video playing speed, which is a frequently used feature, is buried too deep in existing design. Easier control for adjusting video speed is needed. On current YouTube App, it takes 3 steps in adjust playing speed (and many other configurations). Tap on “more” → Select “speed” from list → Choose ideal speed. If you need to change the speed back, good luck repeating the process above one more time.
This is the media player control pervasively used in Chinese video apps. It empowers users to manipulate multiple configurations on the same screen, allowing them to remember the position of each control using special memory.
Good & Bad UI
Great user experiences are a must if digital product design is to succeed in the marketplace. Great aesthetics are important, but are only the final touch that complements a usable product.
Summary:
Major movements: updated logo, dark theme, refreshed UI, Typography (cleaner look)
Simple and minimal design that boosts experience,
Use of white space as a divider to make core content shine more vividly
In a touch driven world, use gestures as new clicks (minimize playing video)
“The color of the video titles have been changed from blue to black whereas links in the video description have been changed from black to blue.” — Interesting point!
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YouTube follows the style and feel defined in material design for brand consistency, using solid-filled icons, that just carries right enough weight on each icons.
Displaying Num of Views for each video, leveraging the power of social conformity to bring trendy and popular content to users attention.
Improvements:
“Add Micro-animation to like button to delight users and potentially encourage more interactions.”
“Introducing subtle rounded corners to videos for a much modern feel and complement the rise of mobile screens with rounded corners in full screen mode”
“Icons repeated on ‘Add to’ and ‘Create new playlist’ feature” — issues solved in the latest version
Business Point of View
Product direction promote more live video streaming to increase user engagement. Improvements: add a prominent “start video” button to encourage users create content as market for live streaming is rapidly increasing.
Recommending both YouTube Mix and user-generated playlist to diversify the selection, prioritized based on user behavior and recent activity.
Platform for Media Community. Google+ failed, YouTube could be Google’s answer to social media and messaging platforms by providing a place for users to see their sharing activities, subscribers’ browsing history, contacts in their network are watching, and discover trendy content.
