For Illinois Design Consulting I had the amazing opportunity to work with Youtube Shorts. We were contracted by YouTube's UX Research Manager, Silvia Vergani to conduct user research and testing on the YouTube Shorts interface. Our team decided to focus on the content creators' user journey. Our project culminated with a final presentation to Silvia.
After learning about the platform, we started preparing questions for the first round of interviews. While prepping, we looked for content creators on short-format video apps to recruit for our interviews. We looked to recruit a wide range of demographics and followings to give us the best understanding of the content creation process.
To gain a better understanding of a content creator’s perspective, we hosted 60-minute interview sessions that asked a series of questions that correlated to their experience with short-form videos. These interviews took the format of semi-structured interviews and we really got to understand what it takes to be a short-format video content creator.
We then debriefed our findings from Google Docs into a Miro Board to sort out key insights. We aimed to pull as many direct quotes to support our findings later in the process. These interviews help us accomplish our goal of understanding how people create short-format videos.
We then took our understanding of the content creation process to the next level of interviews. In this round, using the content creators we found in the recruitment process, we sought to conduct usability testing. We decided to implement the think-aloud protocol as a low-resource, high-feedback testing technique. In addition to that, our project manager conducted research and found a solution on how to implement hybrid in-person and virtual usability testing. Sarah discovered the company MailChimp using laptop hugging along with other large companies.
The use of laptop hugging allowed our project manager to see the usability testing from zoom as well as keep recordings for analyzing purposes. The participant would sit down and carry out the two tasks we provided, with limited guidance. Our two prompts were:
If I asked you to create a short, where would you first go to do that? Go ahead and navigate through the app. Next, upload a photo background (your choice) and record yourself explaining what the photo depicts.
Let’s say you have a favorite song and you want to use it as the background music for a YouTube Short. How would you go about doing that within the app?
Our team had been parallelly synthesizing and debriefing after each phase of the project. However, once the sessions were coming to a close, we held a rapid synthesis session to analyze what we had learned from the users. Plotting pain points, categorizing themes and topics, and going over each usability session helped us deconstruct the current short-form user experience.
Throughout the synthesis process, we found a lot of areas Shorts could improve upon. During the usability testing, we discovered pain points for the users during the creation process. We created a journey map to showcase the user's journey.
Takeaways
Through this project, I've sharpened my interview skills as well as my knowledge of usability testing techniques.
Follow design standards. “X” on the top left of a browser will always mean close. YouTube Shorts confuses creators because it's very similar to TikTok but, more difficult to navigate due to the menu. That being said, content creators have to learn a new platform because the skills are not transferable. Creators will be unmotivated to learn the new platform and not utilize YouTube Shorts' recording and editing features. Instead, creators will be gravitated toward rehashing content from their TikTok to all other platforms, including YouTube Shorts. Our end goal is for users to instinctively know how to use an interface without much guidance. Great UX is UX you don’t notice.
P.S. I would implement a double-tap forward or backward feature similar to YouTube's long-format video player. That way, it's consistent with YouTube's interaction functionalities. Currently, there isn't a way to navigate the length of the video :)
I’m grateful for the amazing team I had the pleasure of working with!
Uploading a Background
Given the first task of uploading an image using the green screen feature, users found it difficult to upload an image as a background. Users are used to uploading their own images via the bottom-left gallery square. This can be confusing because that square is only meant for uploading pre-existing videos to post as Shorts.
Trimming Music & Video Content
Users found it difficult to figure out how to trim content. Icons were often confusing, and finding the video trim feature wasn't apparent to users.
