Youtube Creator Studio

Summary

Role: UX Researcher
Team: 5
Time frame: 3 months
Methods: Brainstorming, User Research, Market Research, Contextual Inquiry, Comparative Evaluation, User and Stakeholder Interviews, Usability Testing, Affinity Diagramming, Personas, Interaction Map, Heuristic Evaluation, Survey Design

Creator Studio is a tool utilized by content creators on YouTube which is a video sharing platform to create, manage and share videos. While Creator Studio has long been a feature available for creators, the Beta Desktop version is a revamped version of the original classic. We partnered with YouTube Creator Studio Beta version to understand the product and provide recommendations that would improve the experience of emerging YouTube Creators using it

Understood the application better by building an interaction map.

Performed User and Stakeholder interviews to understand their usage of YouTube Creator Studios. Transcribed the interviews and designed Affinity Diagram to deduce key findings

Did Comparative evaluation to understand the competitors of YouTube

Designed an extensive survey to better understand the users

Did heuristic evaluation to better understand the product and its' features

Performed usability testing to identify the problematic areas and what works well

Goal

Our goal was to investigate and provide insights into the user experience of the YouTube Creator Studio.

Interaction Map

We began by understanding the working of YouTube Creator Studio Beta version in a better way which lead us to building an interaction map

Check out the interaction map here

Interviews

To understand the expectations of the stakeholders, we interviewed people at YouTube in the initial stage itself which helped us head in the right direction. We interviewed emerging as well as established YouTubers among which I was responsible for interviewing 2 emerging Creators. The interviews helped us to understand how different user groups use YouTube Creator Studio beta version.

Based on this, we developed personas which really helped to understand the users and their expecations from YouTube.

Comparative Evaluation

We performed a comparative analysis of 9 of YouTube’s industry competitors to look at the innovations, trends, and successes in online content creation. We listed out the features that YouTube has and doesn't have.

Check out the detailed version here

Surveys

We conducted an online survey for both YouTube Creators and Viewers to gather quantitative data that lead us to significant findings. I was in-charge of the creator section of the survey and I also formatted the survey in Qualtrics to make it usable. YouTube also put our survey questions out in the public which was very useful.

Heuristic Evaluation

To better understand the website we tested the heuristics of the current website. I was responsible to develop the heuristics to test the Creator Studio help and documentation section. I based my heuristics on the Nielsen heuristics for user interface design in order to find rapid and easy fixes for the Beta version.

Check out the detailed version here

Usability Testing

As the last and final step, we created and ran a usability test. I was responsible for running 3 tests where I performed the role of either moderator or note-taker. We came up with tasks that the participants had to performs which focussed on different features of YouTube Creator Studio. The main aim of this step was to gain a detailed view of what works and what are the navigation issues that participants faced while interacting with the interface. This step led to a huge revelation which proved to be very helpful to come up with findings and recommendations.

Check out the video to get deeper information about our findings and recommendations that we provided to YouTube.