YouTube Launch: Kickstarting a YouTuber’s Journey
Duration
Sept - Dec 2020
Team
Jago Pang (Project Mentor)
Jessica Chou
Conner Manuel
Role
Ideation & Prototyping Lead
Tools
Figma
Overview
YouTube is an online video-sharing platform, who's mission is to give everyone a voice and show them the world. A common profession people dream of becoming is a YouTuber. However, the actual process of becoming one is hard. According to YouTube, there is no right way of doing so, success is different for everyone, and the return of investment if rather low in retrospect to your growth.
YouTube Studio is the home for creators. YouTubers can manage their presence, grow their channel, interact with their audience, and make money all in one place.
Problem
How might we help creators get started on YouTube, and provide motivation along the way?
Solution
We created a digital exploratory mobile experience on YouTube Studio that helps new, intentional creators worldwide to get started and continue to stay motivated to be a YouTuber.
A program within YouTube Studio to guide new content creators through the first steps of their Youtube Journeys.
1. Onboarding
User completes a quick survey experience and is greeted at the home page of Youtube Studio. User can click through the tool tips to learn more about the Launch program.
2. Dashboard
The Launch card shows upcoming milestones and personalized tooltips to guide user through their beginning journey as an aspiring YouTuber.
3. Inspiration
The curated videos allows users to view a variety of categorized videos with similar interest, tool tips, and exploration of other genres.
Launch shares articles and success stories from other YouTubers with similar interests to boost motivation and inspiration at the beginning of the creator’s journey.
4. Milestones
Milestones provides guidance and captures the agency of tasks.
With the beginning stages of the YouTuber’s journey, they can look back at their accomplishments and be filled with a deep sense of gratification.
Design Decisions & Process
User Research
For our research to learn more about content creators, we focused on:
• Pain points and motivations of being a YouTuber / aspiring to be a YouTuber
• User habits and experiences with YouTube Studio and content creation
• Analyzed existing creator on-boarding experiences and market trends
Key Insights
Design Direction + Synthesis
Because YouTube’s current solution deals with external motivation in the form of analytics like subscriber / view count with the goal of monetizing, we decided to focus our design on encouraging new YouTuber's’ intrinsic motivation during the most critical time at the beginning of their journey. This direction allows us to focus on newer creators and help alleviate confusion about how to navigate YouTube.
Polarity Mapping
We categorize our users based on the spectrum of self-expression to community building and casual to serious creators.
User Persona
We then decided to fully flesh out the “casual, self-expressive” persona in the upper left quadrant, because they would be one of the least motivated people in the early stages of their journey.
Journey Mapping
Our goal was to solve and alleviate problems causing demotivation and maintain the points where the user has high motivation. We prioritized “first steps and planning” in our subsequent ideation process since the problem space surrounds motivation at the beginning of the YouTube journey.
Ideation
We ideated under 2 Focus Areas that emphasized intrinsic motivation of creators: Discovery and Goals
Low-Fidelity Prototypes
Sketching our ideas lead us to 4 main concepts: Onboarding, Memories, Inspiration, and Task Management.
We designed a program that anchored a full user experience on onboarding, in order to see how we could best design an onboarding survey to help the user reflect on their priorities and feel confident throughout their journey.
Storyboarding —> Finalized Direction
We created a storyboard that shows how the onboarding can affect the user experience and the features it impacts, and if the whole experience is accounted for. During this process, it helped us realize that it wasn't the onboarding that we should focus on.
We decided to focus on the outputs of onboarding and their relationship with YouTube as a content creator from early on in their YouTube career with a focus on milestone achievements, so we made mid-fidelity mockups of these different outputs.
Mid-Fidelity Prototypes
We wanted to provide more guidance and capture the agency of tasks without the burden, we turned the idea into milestones.
We collated our ideas in relation to guidance and discovery, and created a single, unified interface for these resources using an inspiration board.
Information Architecture
With the finalized direction, we created an information architecture to organize our new features into the existing YouTube Studio architecture.
Hi-Fidelity Prototypes
Using our structured IA and main user persona, we created high-fidelity prototypes while using YouTube Studio's existing design system.
User Testing
After receiving feedback from our client, we did our second round of iterations and user tested a total of 4 current and aspiring YouTubers. Through our user tests, we learned:
Reflection
Storytelling and Communicating
We wanted to frame our design process through storytelling by utilizing scenarios and use cases. We discussed the possible ways to tell a coherent story to present our deliverable to YouTube Studio stakeholders. This helped reinforce our proposed solution to the given problem statement.
Adjust and Adapt
One of the biggest challenges my team and I faced was when one of our team members dropped from our team. As a team, we had to quickly adjust and adapt. We figured out how we were going to split the sprints moving forward and made sure that we were not overloaded with work. Through communication and flexibility, it helped us overcome this obstacle.
A huge thanks to Bryan, Shuang, and Constantine from the YouTube team for their continuous support and mentorship throughout this project. It was reassuring to hear the YouTube stakeholders say that they can see our ideas come to life in the near future!