Maximizing business values through design

YouTube has established itself as the leading online-video sharing platform for its reputable availability and authenticity. Over the past 15 years, its generated $15.15 billion USD in revenue and solidified its global trademark. Despite success, users continue to experience reoccurring pain points.

We followed the Double Diamond process from the beginning to the "end" of our project to create a roadmap to follow which helped us to break down each stage. This allowed us to meet deadlines, identify and contextualize actual problems, and stay on sync as a team.

Final Screens: Subscriptions Management

To frame any problems with the product, we began by collecting assumptions and observations about the YouTube subscriptions management experience.

Assumptions & Observations

Before anything else, I looked into the business of YouTube to further understand what metrics they use to measure their success. It really helped shape where our focus should be and how to solve the problem with the goal of increasing the business in mind.

To confirm our assumptions, we created a survey with relevant questions to recognize trends and form a hypothesis. After synthesizing our data, we realized that there are clear patterns and specific pain points users experience due to two solid factors:

Root of Frustrations

HMW Solve the Right Problem?

Our research allowed us to form how might we questions that we worked towards answering to solve our ultimate user problems.

These questions were formed after analyzing our survey results to magnify what specific angles we need to focus on to aid the friction points of the current YouTube experience.

To confirm our observations and begin forming a hypothesis backed by data, we created a user survey to form no frill personas and understand the problem space more from real users perspective.

Having prioritized ideas based on what can be improved, we wrote a hypothesis that frames the problem for user and business goals.

Users goal Business goal

At this stage, my team and I conducted a series of ideation techniques including Brainstorming and Brainwriting. This allowed us to consider an array of solutions. Following ideation, we mapped what could be improved. To get an idea of where to place our focus first, we prioritized them based on user value, business value, effort and time.

With a hypothesis defined, I laid out the information architecture of the current YouTube mobile app flow to help me easily plot the optimal user flow and path for a user to complete the task.

With the sitemap and IA defined, I created an optimal user flow. This allowed me to quickly and easily understand decisions users would need to make to complete their main goal.

Questions

Following the creation of my hypothesis I rapidly sketched solutions in lo fidelity. This helped me quickly map and understand the current product and consider options for how I could iterate directly in the product.

Following our user flow, each member of our team created a design solution. At this stage we went through deconstruction, various iterations, and conducted an A/A test and A/B test.

During our usability tests, we conducted A/A and A/B tests to validate our solutions and gather data that ultimately guided our decisions.

Before creating lo-fi wireframes, we created a Maze test for users to test our prototype to gain insight of where our weak points were.

The user feedback we received were mostly negative, which in my opinion, is a great thing. This data informed us of where the specific frustrations lie and gained suggestions of what we could do to improve the overall user experience.

Despite validating that multiple selection would be of use to users— we came to the realization that it doesn't solve the problem of reducing cognitive overload.

It might just add to it as users would require scrolling and individually selecting channels they want to remove. This would be an issue for people who are subscribed to more then 100 channels.

This is a concept that we would have explored if we had the time and resources.

After identifying the weak points, we designed a lo-fidelity wireframe of the experience directly in Figma. A Neutral colour palette was used to avoid any decision bias and would use this prototype to get feedback internally. We used the tool Autoflow in Figma to easily map the user flow between each page ahead of converting the pages into a prototype.

Key Iterations

The low-fidelity prototype helped me recognize frustrations with the experience that we improved at the high-fidelity stage. To create the final prototype, we inspected the products style and followed the 8pt rule to effectively and easily create a prototype that was consistent with the product styling.

Styles & Components

Before creating the final prototype, we defined styles and components to easily and quickly help us design consistently as a team. Below are the components that we created. Throughout the building of our final prototype, we found that we consistently had to make minor iterations to the master file to fit everything as a whole. Just one big puzzle.

Main Frustration: Users can't find inactive channels

Overall our usability test results showed that the iterations we made generated a higher success rate. However the user feedback assured us that the main frustration was the inability to find the inactive channels via filters.

Additional Key Findings

1. Time spent completing tasks: 7.4 secs

2. Daily discovery task competition: 63.2 % average success

3. Time spent navigating: 6.7 secs

Below, I present the miss-clicks via heat-map and user feedback on the right.

To ensure that we fixed the right problem, we dived into the user feedback.

The minimal iterations that were made to further push towards efficiency were:

User Flow: Before and After Iterations

This was the first case study I have ever worked on with a team from start to finish. Throughout my journey I encountered roadblocks and dilemmas. From disagreements with team members to time management, I've taken away lessons I didn't think I would've learned if you had asked me before we began.

1. Putting Feelings Aside (It's not personal)

The most valuable lesson I learned during this project was the importance of putting personal feelings aside. One of my favourite parts of product design is working towards solutions to solve other people's problems. We must separate ourselves from our designs because at the end of the day, it's not for us. We're working towards a greater goal.

2. Copy is an incredibily powerful Tool

Visual communication and copy go hand-in-hand. Copy speaks and navigates users—without clarity, users will get confused and leave. Some texts might also be reduced if you use the right term as well as frame context specifically/correctly.

3. Time Management: Think Fast, Think Critically

Time restrictions have influence on the extent of our decisions and many other aspects of our responsibilities. I personally believe every decision, from work to everyday life, needs to have intention and direction. When discussing how we should go about tackling this roadblock, we went through each point to prioritize them by using the Impact vs Effort Matrix.