And there is a flow for that.

A study on how YouTube serves different user needs

YouTube needs no introduction. As the largest video-sharing platform and the second-most popular website in the world, it has more than 400 hours of content uploaded every minute, and one billion hours of content watched every day. With such an astronomical amount of content, it is of the utmost importance that users find the right content among a sea of videos. YouTube uses a variety of flows to help users achieve this goal. In this blog, I will be discussing the five major flows for a user to find an unwatched video they are interested in.

User flow of finding unwatched desired content on YouTube

The very first flow starts by showing suggested videos on the homepage. These videos are tailored to the user’s taste if the user is logged in and YouTube has access to their viewing history. If the user is not logged in, YouTube will instead present him or her with the most recent popular videos. This is the flow with the fewest steps to reach the desired video, and its effectiveness is dependent on the accuracy of YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. Without a doubt, YouTube spends a tremendous amount of effort on constantly perfecting the algorithm with new and existing data from the user and others alike, improving the user experience by suggesting more relevant content to the user, thus making the site more “sticky”. This of course is a double-edged sword. Privacy concern is rising as YouTube understands its users better and pushes tailored content to them, terrifying some users with its eerily accurate recommendation in the process.

The second flow, which is technically a variation of the first flow, is only introduced in the most recent update. A row of suggested search keywords based on the user’s viewing patterns is shown below the search bar at the top of the screen. Once you click one of these keywords, the suggested videos on the homepage will be filtered and only those related to that keyword will be displayed. This is essentially the same as applying filters to your search results, except in this case you can apply only one filter at a time, the filters are auto-generated based on the video content labels, and the results are exclusively from the videos suggested by YouTube.

The third flow is the Search function. The search bar sits at the most prominent place on the screen: in the middle of the top nav, taking up the majority of the screen width. The rest of the top nav has been reduced to icons accordingly to save space for the search bar. Once a user performs a search action with given keywords, a new result page is generated. On this page, there is a filter icon underneath the search bar. Upon clicking it the filter panel will appear, pushing down the search results and revealing five filters for selection: Update Date, Type, Duration, Features, and Sort by. These filters are sorted by their usage frequency during a search, and the filter options are not exhaustive. For example, the Duration filter only has two options: short (<4 minutes) and long (>20 minutes). These design decisions are most likely driven by data analytics. Below the filter section, each search result is presented horizontally, with the thumbnail on the left, and the title, the video description, some other metadata, and certain video feature labels (e.g. 4K, CC, new, live, and etc.) on the right. Video description and feature labels (with the exception of live) are only available on the search result page because both help the users identify the right videos during a search and have limited use elsewhere. Additionally, the thumbnail on the search result page is about 27% larger than the thumbnails on the homepage, further facilitating the users to find the desired content. The results are now displayed with infinity scroll, removing the additional user input required by pagination.

The fourth and fifth flow are common for content sites: Trending and Subscriptions. The former is based on popularity, and the latter is by user choice. These flows are relatively traditional and below are a few highlights:

• The Trending page has a category filter at the top of the page for users to get results specific to particular categories.
• The Subscriptions page can alternate between a horizontal layout like the Search result page and a card-based layout like the homepage.
• There are four different thumbnail sizes used by YouTube. The search result page has the largest thumbnail by far as I mentioned earlier, followed by the homepage suggested videos. The third-largest thumbnail size is used both on the Trending page and the horizontal layout on Subscriptions page. The smallest is the card-based layout in Subscriptions.

Four thumbnail sizes used by YouTube

The reason that YouTube offers a plethora of flows for the user to reach their desired content is probably worth an entire book chapter, but in a nutshell, it is highly relevant to how users consume the content. With seemingly infinite video content available, it is no surprise that there are multiple user needs that YouTube wants to address:

• There are casual viewers who use YouTube as a free alternative to video services like Netflix and Hulu, and consume content at leisure for entertainment. These users are best served by the Trending flow, as they don’t have a clear goal in mind other than to relax and kill time.
• Then there are the hardcore YouTube users who have more selective goals than casual viewers. They may also watch content just for fun, but it could also be for other purposes such as education. For these users, the Subscriptions flow is a perfect way to address their needs. These users have shown their dedication to the video platform by making the effort of signing up accounts with YouTube, and YouTube provides them with the freedom of choosing what they want to be presented with (by them subscribing to their favorite content creator’s channels).
• In a sense, the homepage flow is these two flows with YouTube’s recommendation algorithm thrown into the mix. In the case of hardcore users, YouTube can either suggest similar videos to users beyond their subscribed channels (under-subscribed) or prioritize content from the user’s subscribed channels based on the user’s viewing patterns (over-subscribed). As for casual users, YouTube just throws every popular video on the homepage in hope of some will stick to the wall, and the casual users are motivated to convert to hardcore users by signing up YouTube accounts and subscribing to certain channels for a tailored experience.
• There are also users with highly specific goals that can not be predicted by YouTube accurately. For example, someone is looking for a how-to video tutorial on a particular topic. In that case, YouTube serves these needs with the Search flow, with large thumbnails, detailed video description, and feature labels all guiding the user to the right content.

All in all, this is an exemplar of serving different personas with different user flows and design patterns to best suit their needs and offer optimal user experience.