YouTube

Summary

Duration: September — December 2019
Team: Katherine Ong, Zaid Syed, Jake Cha, Justin Wong
Role: User Research Lead
Deliverables: User Research Report + High-Fidelity Prototypes

YouTube challenged my team of Berkeley Innovation consultants to envision new experiences for paid fans. As the User Research Lead, I put together a research plan spanning desk research, field interviews, and surveys that garnered the participation of over 200 self-described fans. After learning more about fan behavior, we learned that fans valued exclusivity, a view into celebrities’ personal lives, and communal interaction with other fans. We brought a few ideas that engaged these insights to life in Figma, including but not limited to live Q&A’s, video reacts, and live chats. We tested our designs with self-described fans and iterated upon them; at the end, we provided our research, screens, and final vision to the team at YouTube.

Background

In 2018, YouTube introduced paid channel memberships, which allow fans of content creators to pay a small price each month for access to exclusive content, early releases of videos, and more. Our goal was to take this concept and envision how it could apply to celebrity entities — such as musicians, sports teams/players, and famous brands.

This was a visioning project, so there weren’t too many constraints. However, it did have to be YouTube-centric, meaning anything we envision and design should be based within YouTube itself, and therefore probably in line with YouTube’s video-centricity.

HMW: How might we envision an ideal paid fan experience on YouTube?

Research

Berkeley Innovation projects are separated into four sprints: user research, ideation, prototyping, and testing and high-fidelity presentation. Though all members of the team contribute during each sprint, I had the chance to lead research portion, which I learned a lot from. It definitely taught me the value of clear planning early; I made a research plan detailing methods, goals, and tasks and shared it with the rest of our teammates so that we all had an idea of what was going on.

Put briefly, our goals were first to understand what fans of these celebrity entities already do and enjoy. We would later use this to draw insights and inform our designs.

Competitive Analysis

We researched 8 competitors in the space to see how others already catered to fan needs and desires. Some main findings were that:

Fans seem to enjoy demonstrating their loyalty to the celebrity in front of other fans through badges, merchandise, special emojis, and any other form made available to them.

Fans seem to enjoy interacting with other fans online for informational purposes (e.g. joining discussions for product reviews, discussing new albums or releases, etc.).

Generative & Guerilla Interviews

We had the chance to sit down with 7 fans of celebrity entities and performed intercept interviews at two sites: the Lakers and Warriors game at the Chase Center in San Francisco and an Erykah Badu & Yasiin Bey concert in Berkeley.

From these, some main insights were that:

Fans seem to seek content that gives a deeper glimpse into both celebrities' professions (like behind-the-scenes interviews, Q&A) and their personal lives. They value authenticity highly.

Surveys

We put out 3 surveys on Facebook groups and virtual fan communities, with each one catered to fans of music, sports, or brands. In total, we garnered over 202 responses across the three, and findings from the responses were that:

Fans seem to purchase merchandise to show loyalty/community, remember an event they attended, or support the creator. In the age of streaming, 19.59% still purchased music from artists.

Fans online and in-person seem to be social creatures, and they sometimes want attention from other fans or even the celebrities they admire.

Ideation

With those findings in mind, we began to organize our most salient points and draw insights about general fan behavior from them. We used the affinity mapping technique to do so, and here’s a version with some of the most important findings.

With the insights scattered above in mind, we also decided to make some personas. Given we had to design for three different types of fan, we thought it would be a good idea to clearly frame our user groups and keep their needs in mind while we design.

Low-Fidelity Sketching

Next, we began thinking of possible ideas for components of this ideal paid fan experience.

Iteration

Our next goal was to move into Figma, turn those sketches digital, and continue to refine our work. Here are some screens from that mid-point section of the project.

User Testing

To test these designs, we undertook concept testing to validate whether fans would actually want them and see them as part of the ideal paid fan experience. We recruited four undergraduate students who used YouTube frequently to walk us through the designs, tell us what they thought, and give us their first reactions. From this, we knew we had to work on the following:

Clear Copy: Testing participants generally understood what everything was and did, but some areas of the designs needed more straightforward labeling.

Concept Adjustment: Some participants mentioned they would only find value in the discussion if the celebrity participated it frequently. Since this was a visioning project with few constraints, we added that afterward.

High Fidelity

We then incorporated our results from testing into the prototypes to produce these deliverables.

Reflections

It was incredibly rewarding to work with the rest of the team on this project. I’m especially thankful to Melissa, Constantine, Adam, and Christian over at YouTube for their support and mentorship with this project! Being able to justify design choices and explain them is so important, and I’m grateful that they always had the best questions to ask about our choices.

In terms of development as a designer, I learned that some aspects of the process — for example, making personas — are only helpful if you make them helpful. We made personas, but I realized at the end that we rarely really referred back to them to guide our designs. While making them was a good exercise at the time, I think I should have been more mindful to think back to them more often.

I also learned a lot from leading the user research sprint. I have to give a shout out to Katherine for sharing all her user research knowledge with us — it made the process so much easier.