YouTube

Summary

YouTube challenged my team of Berkeley Innovation consultants to envision new experiences for paid 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 limited to live Q&A’s, video reacts, and live chats. Testing it with fans taught us what to tweak, and we provided our research and screens to YouTube to complete the contracted visioning project.

Scroll down for the process! 👇🏼

Process

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?

User Research

I had the chance to lead this sprint, 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 fans. Two main findings were that:

• Fans are sometimes willing to pay for almost anything. From Discord chats to private shows, creators have a lot of room to make money.

• Fans seem to enjoy demonstrating their loyalty to other fans (i.e. through badges, special emojis, etc.)

• Fans tend to seek out updates about the artists/sports players/brands they love the most.

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 really value authenticity in celebrities’ social media presence. They may know their music and professional persona really well, but many indicated that when they seek out more information, they want it to be the behind-the-scenes view of who the celebrity really is.

• Some fans do the things they do (i.e. buy merchandise, go to games or concerts, etc.) to demonstrate loyalty to the entity they love.

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 generally enjoy and seek out interacting with the celebrity online.

• In the age of streaming, a surprisingly high number of fans (19.59%) still purchased music from the artists they were big fans of, suggesting that they feel an urge to monetarily support their favorite creators.

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 it look like we had to design for three different types of fan, we thought it would be a good idea to personify our insights and refer back to them while we design.

Low-Fidelity Sketching

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

Iterating

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:

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.

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