Post on 10-May-2015
The road to 2 billion video views per day
Hong Qu Twitter: @hqu
Design Process at YouTube
CONTENTS
2
• Innovation at YouTube
•What data do we monitor? What metrics matter?
• Nurturing original ideas that differentiate
• Design or engineering: which comes first?
• User behavior experiments
• Localization
• Evolution of YouTube 2005 - 2010
INNOVATION AT YOUTUBE
4
o Who are the users? Create personas (user modeling)
Why do people making funny videos? (content analysis)
Why do people share videos? (social capital)
Talk to customers all the time (informal feedback)
o Automated key metrics updates
o Product direction driven by qualitative/quantitative user feedback
o Everyone feels a sense of ownership
DESIGN INSPIRATIONThink like a game designer
Unpack user behavior the way an anthropologist or sociologist studies social practices5
Formulate strategy at the systems level(e.g. metaphors, game mechanics)
Understand user’s goalsmotivationsincentives
Harness interplay between user segments
LEAN YOUTUBE
Determine what users care about => Focus => Simplify => Focus more => Simplify more
•Release minor updates every week•Release feature upgrades every month•Launch site redesign every year
6
Focus on what's workingo Throw engineers at features that
users want
o Don’t get bogged down by non-performing features(If users don’t even notice the bug, they don’t use it.)
Everyone owns the entire siteo No QA testers
o Fixing bugs in your sleep
7
QUANTITATIVE DESIGN
http://www.flowtown.com/blog/the-state-of-youtube8
YouTube’s rapid growth has generated a lot of data, enabling us to take a systematic and quantitative approach to design.
HEATMAPS
http://www.snap2objects.com/2008/10/17/is-your-website-ready-for-the-5-seconds-attention-span-challenge/9
USER BEHAVIOR TESTING
Model user types and their behaviors
Goal and task analysis
Conduct usability and eyetracking studies
Strategic design thinking at the systems level
How to determine what users want
Triangulate by combining qualitative data from eyetracking and usability research with quantitative data from statistical log analysis and experiments
10
A/B testing quickly devolves into an arms race for attention on the page
Bucket testing helps reveal causality
Multivariate factor analysis is scientifichttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multivariate_testing
METRICS FOR UPLOADERS
11
LOCALIZATION
12
YouTube makes it easy to share via local social networks
13
AUDIENCE EXERCISE
14
‣Please sketch the YouTube homepage from your memory
2005
15
2006
16
2007
17
2008
18
2008 (PREVIEW)
19
2009
20
2010
21
SUMMARY
o Who are the users? Segment users by creating personas (user modeling)
o Identify and automated tracking of key metrics
o Product direction driven by qualitative/quantitative user feedback and log data
o Throw resources at features that drive overall usageo simplify, simplify, and simplify even more
Hong Qu Twitter: @hqu
thank you!
Questions?
23
HTTP://WWW.YOUTUBE.COM/WATCH?V=3VSWREBRFEG24