Helping users get more interesting and diverse recommended content

Overview

Context

Youtube tends to recycle our recommended content, and doesn't expose us to new content either at all, or in a way that makes us want to explore. In a political climate that has been siloing us into creating our own filter bubbles, how can we design a better user experience for a platform like Youtube to get more interesting and diverse recommended content?

We ultimately came up with 3 design proposals that would help in diminishing filter bubbles and providing more diverse, but still relevant content

The primary goal of the Application Tracker project was to help alleviate the stress that comes along with waiting to hear back after applying for a job, and staying up to date on the status of your applications.

If you would like to know more about this project, feel free to reach out to me at priyankasaiprasad@gmail.com

Problem

How might we create a Youtube tailored to your preferences; allowing yo to explore, view, organize, and find diverse content more easily?

Goals

The primary goal of this project was to help in diminishing filter bubbles and providing more diverse, but still relevant content.

UX Research

Need Finding

In order to narrow down the "how might we" question, we started the project by interviewing people and tried to find out how they feel about navigating Youtube and finding related content easily. Since we are a group of college students at UC Berkeley, our target audience was also college students at UC Berkeley as they are the most accessible, however our user group was more diverse than expected, with individuals ranging from ages 14-57, across multiple different cities and states.

User Testing

Insight Categories/User Flow

Five Final Insights

Our insights led into opportunities where better design could enhance the user experience:

From insight one, we learned that people choose their device depending how long they intend to use Youtube for - shorter for content is watched more heavily on mobile, and people in general use mobile more often. However, the small screen didn't give users enough control over what plays next and that is a major design opportunity

From the opening screen, we found that it is generally too cluttered. People tend to go straight to the search bar rather than looking on the main screen. They also don't like the autoplay and recommended content on the screen, and want to be able to tell Youtube that the content is irrelevant. This led to a design opportunity for greater friendliness in layout

We found that non-subscribers get very poorly recommended content, often times getting recommended content that they've already watched before. All users should be allowed to create playlists, and search by their own tags and categories. This gives Youtube a better way to give recommendations based on their history, and can combine tags and categories to explore more diverse content recommendations

We found that people really tend to click on things which are familiar in at least one way - whether it's a channel, a thumbnail style they recognize, or a headline that's similar to what they've watched, & this is key to getting people to click on new content. There is a design opportunity here to make thumbnails easier to make high quality, so that even in recommendations they're clicked more often.

Insight Takeaways

Finally, we found that people often bounce from Youtube after getting headlines that they wanted, especially if they used Youtube for news. This means less engagement overall with the platform. There is a design opportunity for a related headlines and discovery feature that allows someone to browse and explore related content to the video that they are watching.

Challenges

Synthesizing the key opportunity areas for development and creating cohesive possibilities for further iteration. We had a hard time figuring out the most user-friendly feature which could propose a solution to the varied and widespread feedback we received with regards to facilitating followup searches that stem from Youtube, filtering content, and allowing new information to be viewed.

Primary User quotes that related to our 5 insights were as follows:

Design Opportunities

Ideation & Iteration

Based upon our 5 insight categories, we developed 3 potential design solutions, namely:

1. Drag & Drop

2. The Popping Carousel

3. What do you like

Design Opportunity Low Fidelity Sketches

Competitive Analysis

We gathered further research as to what already exists similar to our design opportunities, to get further insight on opportunities for future improvement, and proposal solutions for the 3 cases we developed.

Final Showcase / Design opportunity Deliverables

What would I do differently?

What I would do differently if I were to redo this project would be to spend more time iterating upon the 5 main design possibilities to generate one final design opportunity encompassing feature of the 3 proposals into one. I would also further analyze competitor landscapes and how those features can be integrated into the user viewing experience of Youtube; and would seek to conduct quantitative and observational followup research.

I hope you enjoyed reading about this user experience design project. Feel free to reach out and ask me any questions or follow- ups. Thank you!