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YouTube Shorts Redesign

Project Info

Individual Design Exercise

Tools

Figma

Timeline

March 2024 (1 week)

Who doesn't like watching YouTube Shorts

It's a platform where we spend countless hours watching videos that entertain, inform, and inspire us. When YouTube released Shorts it was an exciting addition to the platform, to show creativity in bite-sized content.

However....

Imagine Alice, a college student, loves YouTube and enjoys its content, but lately, YouTube Shorts has captured her attention, and she has been using it for quite some time now. She loves exploring the world of short-form content, discovering new creators, and sharing her favorite Shorts with friends. While the short, creative content was initially captivating, she faced some challenges like:

Spending too much time watching shorts
Difficulty tracking watched content from favorite creators
Lack of personalized content
Frustration to follow video due to accessibility issue

Faced with these frustrations, a Design challenge emerged...

?

How Might We improve the features of current YouTube Shorts in-order to keep users engage in both views and uploads?

Check Final Designs

RESEARCH APPROACH

So Alice's frustrations ignited a spark of curiosity in me. After identifying potential problems I knew I needed to dig deeper to understand the root causes, gather insights, and provide the best solution. Not only Alice but after some research I found many people dealing with these problems. So this gave me the idea to redesign YouTube Shorts. So I decided to take up this as a challenge to improve the current system and provide the best user experience.

Of course, if I were designing a real product, I would refer to the product's own target audience and the company's roadmap and potentially conduct user testing with prototypes, to think about how crucial and feasible it is for both users and the business. Due to the limited time constraints ( 1 week ) for this case study the research methodologies that I conducted are,

Competitive

Analysis

Secondary Research

User Interview

Research Methods

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

Analysis Reveals Room for User-Centric Innovation

First I started off with a competitive analysis and looked into my competitors which are established platforms like Instagram Reels, TikTok, and Snapchat as they dominate the short-form video space, and did deeper level analysis. I explored user needs, preferences and strengths within these competitor platforms identifying areas where YouTube Shorts can differentiate itself by prioritizing user-centric features.

After gathering competitor's strengths, weaknesses and potential areas where YouTube Shorts has a better opportunity I jumped to my next research methodology which is secondary research.

SECONDARY RESEARCH

In need of Time Management, Personalization, and more accessibility features

Because of the limited time, I decided that online forums would be the quickest way for me to understand the problem. Therefore, I went to platforms like Reddit, and YouTube where I analyzed online conversations about YouTube Shorts to gain valuable context and understand existing knowledge about YouTube Shorts.

What I found was surprising. The volume of online conversations about YouTube Shorts frustrations itself was a significant finding.

Based on my analysis, I realized that occasional viewers and those primarily engaged with long-form content fall outside of my target audience as they might have different needs. While their feedback and experiences are valuable, my focus was on addressing the challenges faced by regular users who spend significant time on YouTube Shorts and engage with specific creators.

Once I gathered all the useful data from secondary research and drew some insights, next process I started user interview for in-depth knowledge and clarity.

USER INTERVIEW

User interest-based content leads to better Engagement

With the insight that I got from secondary research, I created a couple of questions and started asking people about the challenges that they face with YouTube Shorts. I reached out to a diverse group of regular users and creators, those who spend more time on the platform and engage with specific creators, to gather insights and understand their experiences.

"Regular users" are defined as those who:

Spend a significant amount of time on short content.
Actively engage with specific creators.

Questions were aimed to understand:

Specific user behaviors and pain points
Content preferences and discovery
Accessibility considerations
Desired features

Insights from intervew:

Many users shared stories of getting lost in the captivating world of Shorts, leading to extended viewing sessions that sometimes felt endless.
Several users shared that they struggled to recall which videos they had already watched.
Users with diverse needs and preferences emphasized the importance of accessibility features in enhancing their Shorts experience like captions and warnings.
Need an "interest-based" approach to content curation, allowing users to define preferred content categories.

User Quotes:

"I follow a creator who creates shorts series and its difficult to know which video I already watched, in order to continue I need to watch from first which is frustrating "

"I'll just watch one Short, and then suddenly it's been an hour! Ahh it's frustrating! I want to avoid it"

"Honestly, if I could pick some topics I'm into, like cooking tutorials or workout routines, that would be awesome. Right now, it feels like Shorts just throws everything at me"

"Sometimes I'm on the bus and can't blast the volume with my hearing impairment it makes it even harder to catch everything. It would be amazing if creators could add captions to their Shorts, instead of auto-captions"

Insights from all the research methodologies

After conducting all the research and careful observations of each research method, I have listed the findings that show the challenges and preferences of users with short-form video platforms. These insights help me as a foundation to design solutions with satisfy users.

Users want better time management tools or options to avoid getting lost in endless scrolling.
Improved content discovery based on user interest is essential for revisiting and following favorite creators.
Accessibility features like creators adding captions rather than auto-captions are most preferred.
Users desire to have follow-up options like "watched" to track videos about their favorite content creators

DESIGN

Having a good understanding of the final research insights and design goals, I started brainstorming and developing ideas that could help me achieve a better solution. Here's how I translated these insights into action:

Rapid Sketching

For each user insight, I dedicated a short time frame to rapidly sketch out potential solutions on a piece of paper divided into sections so that I could think outside the box and explore different functionalities. This approach served me key purposes like:

Break for overthinking: The time pressure forced me to stop overthinking and just design what I can think first. This allowed me to explore many possibilities before moving on to refine and develop the most promising ideas later.

Using existing functionalities: While I was generating ideas for one of the problem, I thought could current functionalities be repurposed or adapted to address the challenges that I was working? because many of the problems that users are facing are not very complicated they just need an addition or updated solution.

Example: Desire for a More Personalized Content Experience

Existing Feature: YouTube shorts current personalized algorithm
Reimagined Application: One of the ideas I got is the integration of category selection to current shorts feeds where users can select the category that they are interested in and videos are shown accordingly.

Check an INTERESTING idea generated for one of the problems,

LOW FIDELITY WIREFRAMES

After all these brainstorming sessions, countless sticky notes plastered across the wall, and numerous sketched wireframes exploring various solutions, these are the final wireframe ideas solution. These wireframes served as the blueprint, visually representing the layout, flow, and interactions of the redesigned YouTube Shorts interface.

USER TESTING

After finalizing the wireframes I wanted to test how users would perceive it, I conducted an unmoderated usability testing session with a group of 5-7 target users. In this remote testing approach, participants interacted with the prototypes online and I wasn't directly guiding them through tasks, I designed the test to capture their behavior.

The results were positive! Most users liked the updated features, finding them helpful and intuitive. In particular, many users liked the category selection where they could watch videos based on their selected category and appreciated the clear layout that helped them to navigate easily. There were a few suggestions and confusions for users and one such scenario is,

Why do I have to add captions explicitly?

This feedback made me think for a while because my initial idea was creators could add captions by themselves so they are free to add whatever and however they want but after receiving feedback from 2-3 users stating that it is difficult to add captions for every video by themselves.

Then I thought of incorporating AI for captions and also I quickly went through my competitors to check if they are providing this option and if yes, then how they have incorporated it. Sometimes our competitors inspire us, so in this case I was inspired by TikTok like how it has provided the option of auto-caption which helped me in providing the best for shorts, where AI will generate the captions and creators have the flexibility to edit and save the captions. I also thought about its pros and cons as it should not have major affect on the user.

Pros

AI-generated captions require less additional effort from the creator.
They appear automatically, improving accessibility for viewers who need them.

Cons

AI-generated captions can still contain errors like grammatical errors.
Can misrepresent the content.

Even though it has its own pros and cons still it is useful for creators where they can just edit the captions if they find any errors, save and publish it. It saves time and also helps in getting an idea of how captions can be added to videos.

Like this, I made changes to other features from the feedback that I received from user testing and once again went through all the research insights from competitive analysis, user interviews and secondary research to ensure all the user needs and frustrations are answered.

HIGH FIDELITY DESIGN

With all the feedback in mind, I started designing details about how I could link them together into a proper flow. For the visual design aspect, I designed for both dark and light theme and kept consistent with the current style of YouTube shorts, following material design guidelines.

Personalization Process

I have added a category selection icon on the interface itself so user can refine category at any point of time.

This is how category selection screen looks like, users can select category of their choice and can also select other categories along with trending shorts.

Once you select your desired category you can save and watch videos.

FUTURE STEPS

As AI continues to evolve, YouTube Shorts can leverage its technology for better engagement. AI-powered tools can assist content creators and viewers alike, fostering a more dynamic, inclusive and interactive short-form video experience.

Incorporation of Gemini for scriptwriting and Storyboard Generation: Brainstorming unique Shorts ideas can be time-consuming and instead of going to other platforms for idea generation, Gemini can be incorporated within shorts to generate storyboards or script outlines based on user-provided keywords or themes. They can input a topic or concept and also can choose from various creative styles (e.g., comedic, educational, dramatic).

Augmented Reality (AR) Overlays: AR overlays that can be integrated into Shorts. These overlays could be used for virtual try-on experiences, educational demonstrations, or interactive games for specific content. It can help in,
1. creating a more immersive and interactive viewing experience.
2. Offers potential for brand partnerships and sponsored content with AR elements.
3. Helps in storytelling and audience engagement.

Collaborative Live Streams with Short Challenges: A feature can be developed to facilitate collaborative live streams with pre-defined short challenges. Creators could invite viewers to participate in these challenges, and viewers' completed Shorts could become part of the live-stream experience. This can enhance audience participation and community building within live streams.

WHAT I LEARNED

First redesign product

This is my first time redesigning an existing product with a large user base, like adding new features, and enhancing current features. It pushed me to think deeply about how all these changes impact the app's existing flows, interactions, and even the logic behind them. I tried my best to not make major changes in the existing functionalities that make sense for the users so that while they are using the app they won't be affected much.

As YouTube Shorts has a very large user group, I made more conservative choices to choose features that fit better with users' existing mental models. I'm not sure if this is the best approach for redesigns, so I'd love to learn and discuss more about it!

Don't stop creative ideas

I also learned that creative ideas just come to mind at unexpected times as long as you've thought about the topic enough, don't doubt your ideas, and stop working on it by questioning whether will it work? is this right? keep working on it until you find a feasible solution.

While I was doing this project, I made sure to always capture any idea that came to my mind, regardless of its quality, on my Notes app. I started spending more time on shorts and I was using all the features to see how it works both as a viewer and creator. I'd then make notes of them, look through them, and build on them. Several of them ended up in the final design of the feature.