YouTube's playlist feature allows users to organize saved videos, which is excellent for rewatching. However, navigating and finding specific videos within lengthy playlists can be challenging.
Research revealed key insights into how users interact with tutorial-style videos:
To address this challenge, I designed a new feature that enables users to effortlessly find any video among their saved content, facilitating easy rewatching.
YouTube is one of the major platform for video content, but I looked into 3 competing services with more educational/tutorial videos in mind. The analysis helped to highlight the unique value propositions for each product and what opportunities there could be for YouTube:
The goal of the interviews was to learn how people use tutorial style videos so that we can design a feature for this. The 6 participants for this study used YouTube multiple times a week and were interviewed remotely.
There were 3 research objectives:
The affinity map helped to identify insights from all research and to see patterns and overarching themes. It also highlighted insights that were less directly related to the original goal, which focused more on tutorial-style videos.
For example, the map revealed user needs related to finding and organizing saved content within the existing playlist feature, a method commonly used for saving tutorial-style videos.
There were two key insights that were surprising and gave a new direction for the remainder of the design process. These insights emphasized the importance of easily accessing and organizing saved videos.
The findings from the research, with a focus on the two key insights, helped to create a single persona with defined goals, motivations, and challenges.
Making it easier for users to navigate and find specific videos within their playlists, enhances user experience and encourages greater platform engagement by minimizing the time spent searching for content.
Related project goals:
The HMWs helped to ideate and come up with a storyboard and a features list.
The must-have feature of being able to search for a specific video among the saved videos was translated into a user flow.
This flow enables users to leverage the global search function to initiate a search within their saved playlists.
A variety of ideas were explored on how to add a feature to the global search that allows users to search within their saved playlists. Existing YouTube elements were used as inspiration and criteria for decision-making. It was really helpful for me to utilize screenshots of the existing YouTube app and thereby speed up the mid-fidelity wireframe creation process.
The users are able to select the 'Search within playlists' function within the global search. This interaction mirrors the existing filtering functionality on YouTube.
A moderated usability testing session was conducted with 5 participants. The primary objective was to determine which task flow users preferred for searching for a saved video, enabling us to optimize user flows. Participants were given a single task to complete and were then asked to rate the ease of use on a scale of 1 to 5.
The test revealed that users struggled to complete the task independently, often requiring additional prompts. They tended to rely on their existing knowledge of YouTube and attempted to navigate directly to the playlist where they believed the video was saved, rather than utilizing the search function. The limitations of the prototype hindered successful task completion.
Participants rated the ease of use as moderate (3.4 out of 5), citing unfamiliarity with the feature. The interaction design for the search filter within playlists also presented challenges for some users. They anticipated a button or input field instead of the current filter implementation.
This usability test provided valuable insights into how users rely on their existing knowledge of the YouTube platform. This experience highlighted the crucial role of early user involvement in the design process, enabling me to iterate on the design and make necessary adjustments during the high-fidelity wireframing phase.
This approach minimizes the need for a dedicated tutorial to introduce the new feature.
The user flow was updated based on the results from the usability test. Taking the existing knowledge of the user into account, the updated flow provides two primary entry points for searching within playlists:
The global search has been adjusted so that it allows users to search within all videos, their saved videos, and their viewing history. Making it more clear to the user how to interact with it while leveraging existing interactive elements within the YouTube interface.
Users can now initiate searches within their saved videos or viewing history directly from their profile pages, eliminating the need to navigate to dedicated search pages.
Users can initiate a search within all their saved playlists by utilizing the dedicated search bar. This search bar incorporates the visual design of the existing search bar within the history page, providing a distinct visual cue to users.
Additionally, users can initiate a search within a specific playlist by first navigating to that playlist and then utilizing the dedicated search function within the playlist view. This search functionality will exclusively display results from within the selected playlist.
An unmoderated usability testing session was conducted with 10 participants with the goal to get to know which task flow the users prefer to search for a saved video so that we can optimize the task and user flows for this.
The participants were given two tasks to complete using the high-fidelity wireframe prototype:
All participants successfully completed both tasks, with relatively high average ease of use scores of 4.4 out of 5 for Task 1 and 4.2 out of 5 for Task 2.
The testing demonstrated that participants effectively utilized the global search function, demonstrating an understanding of the different tabs for searching across all videos, saved videos, and viewing history.
Furthermore, participants successfully navigated and executed searches within both the global search and within individual playlists.
In general, the usability test showed that the feature works and is ready for development, so there is no need for a revision. There are two things which could be ideated on when taking this project further based on the usability testing.
In some cases the search functionality of the specific playlist was missed and instead the global search function was used. As can be seen in the heatmap below. Both search functions look visually very similar with the search icon.
It would be beneficial to explore other options to make this search function within a specific playlist more easily accessible to users and stand out more.
One participant suggested the ability to select a specific playlist for search directly within the global search interface, rather than navigating to the playlist first. This suggestion aligns with observations from the heatmap, which showed that some participants attempted to select the desired playlist before initiating the search.
This could be achieved by exploring options to select a specific playlists directly in the search and thereby reduce the step to go to a specific playlist page first.
Users played a crucial role throughout this project, beginning with user interviews and the formulation of the problem statement. My initial assumption was to design a feature that would enable users to save specific sections of a video, which I believed would be beneficial for rewatching particular segments of tutorial videos.
However, user research revealed that the primary challenge with the existing playlist feature was the difficulty in locating specific saved videos.
I designed a search feature to address this issue, aiming to make it easier for users to find saved videos within their playlists. Early usability testing with a mid-fidelity prototype revealed that the feature did not function as intended. Users were unfamiliar with the new feature, highlighting the importance of clear onboarding and user education.
This testing provided valuable insights into how users interact with the platform and their existing mental models for navigating and finding content within YouTube. These insights were instrumental in redesigning both the user flow and high-fidelity wireframes to better align with user expectations and behavior.
The next step for this project will be to explore options that enhance the user experience when searching for specific videos within playlists, making the process more intuitive and user-friendly.