Youtube Playlists — Reimagined

Recently, me and my friend created a playlist for us on Youtube to keep adding informative videos as we see them. It was kind of an info hub for us which we can refer to on the go anytime and anywhere. Sometimes we did combine studies on this playlist and we came across a lot of stuff which playlists could not do! 😕

Let us list down some of the use cases for people using playlist. What could that be? 🤔

• A music lover who has all their fav list of songs added to playlists
• One who loves cooking has added food recipe videos to the playlist
• People having playlist of job related info or educational stuff added to playlist for group studies
• Person having interests in various videos of different genres creating playlist of each of them as per their mood

This list can go on… Youtube has a variety of stuff for people globally! 😊

Let us for now take a scenario where a group is doing combined studies and adding videos to a playlist.

What do we expect when we do our group study remotely?

• Put notes/comments on videos — You put notes while adding them to playlist or while watching them so that even if you are done going through once, we have some notes to refer for future. It will not tax user’s memory of remembering parts of all videos when they want to refer it again. This might be optional but good way if I want to point out only watching selected piece of video or rewatching it. This scenario will not be true to music video playlist though but since comments are optional it may work for all kinds of playlists.
• Show dated playlist — So once it is added we know whether it is fresh or old. Filtering will not hamper for other scenarios too and it is not a force filter so user can apply only when needed.
• Some kind of tag saying “Seen or Watched” — This can work very well in all scenarios. You just shuffle on the ones not watched or filter based on any parameter whether by date or by watch status.
• Show alert/error — It shows error when you are trying to add the same video twice. Currently it lets you add same videos and it creates a lot of confusion.
• Filtering — Filter videos based on seen or not seen, old or new, by users, This can help in many ways like prioritising videos while you are on it.
• Human error — It is completely ok if you have clicked any video by mistake and it gets into a “seen” tag mode. Since, you will go over it again if you are doing any group studies or listening to music etc. No matter what genre it is and whether it is your individual playlist of group playlist, user will have its own agenda and filtering will help users get to what is missed.

Below is the playlist design of how I imagined it would be at first glance. 👩‍💻

• So dates give you an idea whether you have missed out on anything lately.
• Seen tag highlights in enough amount for user to reduce cognitive load of remembering what is watched.
• FAB of filter icon will be most used as per user’s mood/agenda to watch videos or shuffle on them.

This may seem a very small change however it is very important for daily productive work when users totally rely on your apps. It is sometimes more important to talk about all scenarios of these regularly used apps. Increasing customer base is one thing but whether that customer is happy is also a thing which comes first.

I feel there are many apps which are globally used and who has been in the market for so long and their user base is not going to go anywhere. Their companies don’t have fear of losing their customers because there is nothing like the same kind out there. They have stopped thinking of additions to make for the betterment of users in these times of remote working.

When we say remotely working, it has given us so many use cases we still need in our day to day apps and which can help users be productive.

We have been focusing more on becoming advanced nowadays and looking out for inventing technologies which is good but it is also necessary to watch out on the stuff we had back then where we had started evolving. 😊