Exclusive: Inside YouTube’s War Room
Since YouTube launched a complete redesign of its video pages last week, the Google-owned website has been flooded with a mixture of praise, criticism, and complaints. That shouldn’t surprise you — whenever a major social media website launches a redesign, users respond with volume.
YouTube (YouTube) was prepared for this, though. Every day since the redesign, core members of the team have met in what has been dubbed the “YouTube War Room,” a conference center where the team gathers to discuss and address the feedback coming from YouTube’s forums, blog post comments and even the Twitterverse.
Last Friday, I had the exclusive opportunity to sit in on one of these war room meetings. I saw all of the feedback they had collected, listened to them debate over aspects of the redesign, and provide new insight into the changes you can expect YouTube to roll out very soon.
Here’s my look inside the YouTube War Room:
The Workings of the War Room
YouTube War Room meetings work like this: feedback is gathered by members of the YouTube team and compiled into a single Google Doc, which is then placed on two giant flat-screen TVs at the end of the conference room. It’s a chaotic collection of comments, tweets, emails, and blog posts containing raw feedback from casual users, partners, and die-hard regulars.
Someone leads off the discussion by reading off a piece of feedback or circling back to one the addressed in a previous war room meeting. At this gathering, Community Marketing Manager Mia Quagliarello kicked off the conversations. Also present in the room for this particular meeting: Chris Dale (spokesperson), Shiva Rajaraman (senior product manager), Margaret Stewart (head of the user experience team), Colin Whitlow (senior strategist), and one or two others.
Now for the interesting part: the actual feedback. The discussion kicked off with an admission that there were still features that were broken or missing. When the team discussed the missing playlist randomization feature, they simply admitted that “we forgot about it” and that the feature is coming back soon. They also reviewed user complaints about not being able to see the number of comments and not having the ability to see all comments at once.
Immediately the team agreed to add back in the comment count and discussed ways to “tighten up” the flow of comments using comment separation and grouping. In the next week or two, you can expect a visual to be posted that demonstrates the direction that the team is heading in terms of YouTube comments.
Another change you should expect for YouTube comments: timestamps. Shiva noted that they were hoping to have real-time timestamps for comments — this means each comment would have a timestamp of “6 seconds ago” or “1 day ago” instead of a specific date.
The Ratings
The discussion around the video rating system was one of the most interesting parts of the meeting. The team spent a significant portion of their time addressing user concerns surrounding the removal of the 5 star rating system and the implementation of the thumbs-up and thumbs-down system. A common complaint was that people missed seeing the total ratings numbers, which provided users context about the video. For example, by seeing how many people rated a video, users could quickly tell how popular a video was or whether it was simply a rickroll in disguise. Some even said that they “don’t trust ratings anymore.”
Addressing those issues became a focus of the war room meeting; while the team felt strongly that the thumbs-up/thumbs-down rating system was the right move, they also agreed that they needed to spend some time running experiments to determine where and how to display ratings. One of the new proposals that they floated around was displaying a “percentage liked” stat right when you land on the video page. Thus, you would know that 85% of people liked this video without having to open the views or subscription box at all.
Communicating With the Userbase
YouTube will be writing several blog posts addressing user feedback, with at least one to come this week. For example, the war room team decided to draft a blog post about the principles behind the visual design of the new layout and how the decision to implement minimalist pages was partly driven by a desire to keep the focus on the video content. The post was drafted in response to feedback that the page had too much white space and needed more color.
It seems as if they got a lot of things right in this redesign, though, and the initial data has been favorable to YouTube. Subscriptions shot up due to the less cluttered header and the more prominent placement of the subscription box. Said Shiva: “Any scenario where subscriptions drop is unacceptable.”
However, the team stressed that it was too early to draw any conclusions; they need to gather more data on things such as uploads, which tend to spike over the weekends. Chris noted that people have specific expectations for performance right off the bat, but the truth is that it will take people time to learn the new interface, which will change usage and usability patterns.
The Redesign Has Just Begun
Shiva, Mia, Margaret and the rest of the team covered a lot of ground in the hour-long meeting. They addressed new feature requests (being able to pre-buffer videos you’re most likely to watch), features that were removed (a Blogger (blogger)-only option for quickly adding videos to a blog, which had super-low usage), and interface changes (the video uploader’s avatar isn’t displayed on the video page anymore — this is something that they’ll address with a horizontal badge page (that partners already have access to)).
It’s clear that YouTube is listening to feedback and is taking it seriously, even if the company isn’t going to implement every piece of advice it receives from its users. However, you can expect YouTube to roll out a lot of feature updates and blog posts surrounding comments, interface display, and ratings over the next few weeks.
What my trip to the YouTube War Room clearly demonstrated was that the video page redesign isn’t done — it’s only just begun.
No comments:
Post a Comment