Femote
ilovecreatives
Berkeley Innovation
Come Make Your Mark
YouTube Shorts
Feb
Interface Design UX Research Contract
YouTube Shorts is the short-form section of the online video-sharing platform YouTube.
Launched in 2021 to showcase lightweight, short-form, vertical formatted videos, Shorts is built for creators to update & engage their audiences through a new mobile-optimized experience.
Design Consultant
(Berkeley Innovation)
CLIENT
YouTube Shorts
Angie Nguyen
Danielle Wong
Hamid H.
Leon Zhang
Figma
Overview
PROBLEM SPACE
While short-form content has rapidly risen in popularity throughout recent years, many users feel discouraged when engaging with YouTube Shorts due to the search experience on the platform. The search for relevant & quality short-form content when browsing is difficult.
MY ROLE
Our team was tasked with exploring users’ motivations behind browsing & searching behaviors on short-form content platforms in order to optimize the visual interface experience of YouTube Shorts. As the prototyping lead, I guided the team in converting key insights from research into hi-fi mobile designs on Figma under the mentorship of an Interaction Designer from YouTube.
THE CENTRAL QUESTION
How might we improve the YouTube Shorts searching and browsing experience so “gatherers” & “hunters” can more easily find content relevant to their interests?
EXISTING PATTERNS
IN OUR USER GROUPS
But what are “Gatherers” and “Hunters”?
When looking at existing searching patterns in how users interact with the interface, query formulation can fall into four overarching categories based on how broad the users’ search is & how strong their intentions are.
Users that demonstrate a strong match between these two criteria can be bucketed into the “Gatherer” or “Hunter” user groups.
EXPLORATION
To diversify our findings, we launched further research into users’ behaviors and general attitudes when interacting with short-form content platforms in comparison to YouTube Shorts.
Focusing on our two identified user groups, we detailed the emotional experience of interacting with the visual interface. Particularly, we wanted to understand which steps of the process users tended to feel unmotivated & drop off (
CONSOLIDATING OUR INSIGHTS
In addition to journey mapping, key insights were consolidated through methods of affinity mapping & user personas.
Qualitatively evaluating insights in accordance to their archetypes & major recurring themes allowed us to gain a more wholistic understanding of users’ behaviors.
More importantly, what did we discover? From our research, we found that the following pain points were the largest deterents for users.
BRANCHING OUT
Ideas were ranked across our prioritization matrix with each idea color-coded according to the category of pain points drawn from our key insights it specifically addressed.
Focusing on ideas in the top quadrants, we aimed to implement high impact & high feasibility features into our final solutions.
REMEMBER THIS?
Users were initially deterred by irrelevant content, a disjoint between YouTube Shorts and its parent interface, and a lack of personalization when engaging with the interface.
Our Solutions
AREAS OF IMPROVEMENT
There’s always room to grow! And often that begins with self-reflecting on how we can improve in the future.
Shoutout to such an amazing team and our mentor, Leon, for his guidance!
Our project with YouTube Shorts gave me the unique opportunity to take a deeper dive into a platform that we all engage with on a daily basis. Due to the broad nature of the project, we also had the opportunity to flex our creative muslce and explore a wide variety of potential solutions.
And thank YOU for stopping by this project