1. Design Process at YouTube
The road to 2 billion video views per day
Hong Qu
Twitter: @hqu

2. CONTENTS
• 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
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3. http://www.youtube.com/testtube
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4. INNOVATION AT YOUTUBE
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 Productdirection driven by qualitative/quantitative user
feedback
o Everyone feels a sense of ownership
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5. DESIGN INSPIRATION
Think like a game designer
Formulate strategy at
the systems level
(e.g. metaphors, game
mechanics)
Understand user’s
goals
motivations
incentives
Harness interplay
between user segments
Unpack user behavior the way an anthropologist or sociologist studies social practices
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6. LEAN YOUTUBE
Focus on what's working
o 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 site
o No QA testers
•Release minor updates every week
Fixing bugs in your sleep
o
•Release feature upgrades every month
•Launch site redesign every year
Determine what users care about => Focus => Simplify => Focus more => Simplify more
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8. QUANTITATIVE DESIGN
YouTube’s rapid growth has generated a lot of data,
enabling us to take a systematic and quantitative
approach to design.
http://www.flowtown.com/blog/the-state-of-youtube
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9. HEATMAPS
http://www.snap2objects.com/2008/10/17/is-your-website-ready-for-the-5-seconds-attention-span-challenge/
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10. USER BEHAVIOR TESTING
A/B testing quickly devolves into Model user types and their
an arms race for attention on behaviors
the page
Goal and task analysis
Bucket testing helps reveal Conduct usability and eyetracking
causality studies
Strategic design thinking at the
Multivariate factor analysis is systems level
scientific
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multivariate_testing
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
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11. METRICS FOR UPLOADERS
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12. LOCALIZATION
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13. YouTube makes it easy to share via local social networks
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14. AUDIENCE EXERCISE
‣ Please
sketch the YouTube homepage from your
memory
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15. 2005
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16. 2006
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17. 2007
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18. 2008
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19. 2008 (PREVIEW)
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20. 2009
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21. 2010
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22. 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 usage
o simplify, simplify, and simplify even more

23. thank you!
Questions?
Hong Qu
Twitter: @hqu
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24. HTTP://WWW.YOUTUBE.COM/WATCH?V=3VSWREBRFEG
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