YouTube Design Patterns
YouTube. I use it, you use it. We’re in quarantine. We’ve all probably explored YouTube a little more than we expected (Lofi music is now recommended way more on my feed). YouTube’s flow is really meant to expose you to content as fast as possible and to keep you there.
Let’s look at this in more detail. How do you start watching a video? Well, there’s a couple key design patterns just on the homepage to get us started.
- Thumbnails: the YouTube homepage is loaded with video suggestions for you to check out. This is all organized in a grid and simply includes a thumbnail of a video as well as the video’s title and creator. YouTubers know and freely admit the thumbnail and title associated with their video directly correlates to click through rates. For those of us with a robust enough history, your homepage is probably all you need to get going down a rabbit hole of videos for a few hours.
- Search bar: ubiquitous on almost every website, YouTube’s search bar is simple and offers auto-complete to get you back to scrolling through video suggestions quickly. Though your results page does offer additional filters to help those that might be looking for something specific.
- Topical filters: for those looking to browse through videos, but want to watch something a little more specific, YouTube recently rolled out topical filters based on your history. So if you’re in the mood to watch some cooking videos or dog videos, YouTube will narrow down your recommended feed to the topic of your choice.
- Infinite Scroll: can’t find something that piques your interest? Well YouTube has suggestions on suggestions, so you can keep scrolling until you find that one random vlog you were hoping for.
Now the real trick is how YouTube gets you to stay and watch videos for hours. There are a couple of ways the user flow can go as you can see in this flowchart. The default option is “auto play” and unless you turn this off, YouTube will just keep playing video after video. This is a pretty common pattern on other video services as well, especially Netflix and Hulu.
However, my new favorite thing (which I JUST discovered in making sure I understood the user flow in order to write this article) is the ability to add a video from the suggested video list to your “Up Next” queue. I’ve always thought that this would be the more frictionless way to queue up videos you’re actually interested in rather than add the video to a “Watch Later” playlist that you need to navigate to later. And, well, YouTube is a step ahead of me here, so my YouTube experience just got way better.
But let’s finish up by talking about the results of the design here. YouTube uses a lot of common patterns but also patterns that don’t require too much user input(think search bar, auto-complete, auto-play, recommended feed, etc.). This helps most people, regardless of demographics, to feel comfortable in navigating around the site and finding content that they want to watch. Combined with Google’s powerful auto-suggestion feature and algorithm, you’re pretty much guaranteed to find a video you want to watch. Whether you’re looking up a “how-to” or simply browsing for entertainment, YouTube admittedly does a great job of filtering and sorting through 1000s of videos to bring up ones that are relevant to you. This is all fairly seamless from a user perspective and with a single goal — your engagement — in mind.