YOUTUBE REDESIGN
Background
Youtube and many other immensely popular social media platforms boast a great diversity of user-generated content within its webpages. For many new creatives, these platforms offer the prospect of sharing a part of themselves to like-minded people – expressing their passions and creativity through video content and other mediums. For others, especially the younger generation, it can be overwhelming to get started – with toxicity, self-perception, and even the platforms themselves creating obstacles on their path towards self-expression and growth. How can you cultivate a passion if getting feedback from others involves the possibility of hate speech or destructive criticism from random commenters? From listening to many of our peers’ similar experiences, we felt that this issue with many content platforms was important and could blossom into a solution that benefits more than just young, fresh content creators.
User Research
We surveyed 20 content creators. Though our sampling might have introduced some unknown bias, almost all the people we surveyed were in the 18-24 age range, with a fairly proportional distribution of genders. From those surveyed, we had a diverse amount of content people were interested in creating with gaming (9), comedy (3), and lifestyle (3) videos being the most frequent (besides those not interested in any particular topic). Below are some key insights we had
Many of their reasons for creating stem from similar passions: friendship, validation, self-expression, empowerment, educating, or simply just “having fun”.
When bringing up whether the issue of internet toxicity and destructive criticisms affect their desire to create content, many talked about how negativity is “an expected aspect of content creation”. Some ignore it while others often feel “less confident” because of it. One person even mentioned that, for them, it was self-inflicted: by “looking at more successful/beautiful/aesthetic creators” and “[defining themselves] via statistics”
In terms of their proficiency with the content they create (based on a scale of 1 to 5, with a range of “no experience / still exploring” to “lots of experience”), most still consider themselves beginners (see figure below). Whereas when asked about their growth and how they want to grow, many answers ranged from gaining technical skills (video editing, color correction) to singular goals (becoming an affiliate, financial compensation) to soft skills (courage, public speaking, voicing their opinions better)
Problem Statement
Young, prospective content creators need a safe space to express and share their passions without fears of internet toxicity, in order to grow both personally and as a creative.
How might we:
Create a safe space for content creators that encourages a more positive culture?
Connect like-minded creators in communities to foster personal and creative growth?
Personas
UX Flows
We created two user flows. For our first user flow, it is inspired by the Youtube subscriptions category. We wanted to add a separate section which is called Bubbles. Users can click on the Bubbles section and it would bring them to the Bubbles home page. From there, they can look through Bubbles that they might want to join or even create their own. People can find a community or start a community.
Our second user flow is another way to create Bubbles. Instead of it just being a category like the subscriptions, it can be completely separate like Youtube Kids. It would look different from the regular Youtube interface and be a “bubble” that people can have.
Lo-Fi Prototype
This would be the bubbles home page. It shows recommended bubbles that the user might like to join. It also shows the bubbles you are in on the bottom left column.
This is the screen that users will see if they click on the create bubble button on the very bottom left of the above screen. They can choose the name of the bubble, the max amount of people that can join the bubble, and the topics their bubble would fall under.
This is the community tab of a bubble. Members of the bubble can post here.
Hi-Fi Prototype
The following screen is our Explore page. Originally, the content displayed was split up into two different sections. During our user testing, our users said that it was confusing to have two different pages that serve the same purpose of suggesting new “spaces” that people could join. Therefore, we combined it into one page.
Our users also complained that they did not like the sound of “bubbles” and preferred “spaces”, so we changed it to spaces.
This is Your Spaces page. At the top, the user can see the spaces that you are in. They can also post into a specific space you are in. Beneath that, they can see posts from all the spaces that you are in.
This is the screen you get when a user clicks to join a space. In the vein of Facebook Groups, we plan to add a moderation feature complete with preliminary questions whenever users join new spaces. While obviously we cannot prevent toxicity entirely on our new offshoot of YouTube, we hope to minimize it as much as we can in our designs (in addition to our previous means of promoting positivity). These questions are one way of doing so, encouraging more active, positive creators within these private spaces.
This is the general feed of one specific space that a user is in. We added the spaces on the left side for easy navigation.
Users can click into specific posts in the general feed. They can comment, read through other comments, like, and reply to other comments.
