Why products are designed the way they are: Youtube quicklists vs autoplay
I think that we can all agree that Youtube is an excellent means to while away hours on end. You can chose to do so with Dan Mace videos or cat videos. You can binge and then hate yourself later or you can use these videos to inspire you to do more and to be more. The choice is yours really.
But that’s not what I want to write about now.
The one thing that has bothered me about Youtube for a while now is the tediousness of queueing videos. By which I mean you can’t. At least not in the way that you can queue up music to listen to on Apple Music or Spotify.
You could add a bunch of videos to watch later but that seems like a longer way to do a simple task. What I would like to do is click on the drop down menu next to a video and select “Play Next” or “Add to queue”. It seems like neat, almost obvious feature.
So I did some research and found that you can, but only on Chromecast. Which kinda sucks.
If I’m watching a Mango Street video, the other suggestions I’d get would include more Mango Street videos and maybe a couple of Sorelle Amore videos. I would like to be able to choose multiple videos from that list to watch next instead of just one.
I then did some more research and it turns out that Youtube back in the early years — when the interenet wasn’t quite as aesthetic(scroll down for an image) — did have this feature. You could select a video and add it to your queue. This queue would be visible in a grey box at the bottom of your screen.
I also found that people hated it. They hated the grey box. Because if I’m being honest, it’s quite hideous. I can’t find a lot of opinions regarding the feature itself. But several people on several forums have been quite vocal on the hideousness of the grey box.
Here is my favourite comment written in early 2000’s Internet Slang feat. Random CaPitalistION:
Mannn dis sht is rediculous i cant even check my messages or read my FFFReAAKiN comments wat the FReak is the world cOmIng to!! more addon crap like this and youtube will FAil!!! the more youtube tries to upgrade it seems like a downgrade!
— thatBuffguy
thatBuffguy may gave been wrong about Youtube failing, but he was right about everything else. And I think you’ll agree. If you don’t remember the Quicklist from 2010, here is a screenshot that’ll jog your memory:
So that begs the question — would people have enjoyed the feature if it had been designed better in the first place? And if yes, did Youtube try?
Since I couldn’t find any literature there, I got on the WayBackMachine to see if there were any changes.
From my hour scouring through the archive, I figured that the feature disappears by 2013. In 2011, you can make a queue- reffered to as a Quick List easily enough. And in 2012, you need to login to make a playlist so its quite unclear to me if this playlist can be a quicklist. But by 2013, the feature has been renamed Watch Later. Which is what it is now.
And then I found this on an obscure part of the internet:
Hey everyone,
We are currently combining some of the functionality of the Queue and Watch Later features on the site into a more comprehensive Watch Later list. Here are the key changes:
— Queues (temporary lists of videos that go away at the end of viewing sessions) will no longer exist.
— The Watch Later list (a permanent set of videos stored as a playlist in your account) will now have the following features:
1. Available to logged in users only; logged out users who click the “+” on thumbnails will be encouraged to sign up / sign in.
2.The selected videos are stored under a Watch Later list accessible in your account.
3.The Watch Later list is persistent — e.g. it’ll live across browser sessions, and different computers too (when you log in)
4.Can only add to the Watch Later list a) via the embed player, b) via the “Save to -> “Watch Later” dropdown on Watch, and c) via clicking “+” on any thumbnail.
Let us know what you think!
My guess would be that they didn’t test out other versions. They merged it without making smaller tweaks first. But I can’t say for sure so this is a bit of a dead end.
Alternatives
Another argument is that Youtube does offer you alternatives to this feature. Namely: Watch Later, Playlists and Auto-Play. All pretty cool.
But the playlists are tedious and the list stays. Which sucks. I’d like to queue up videos and never have to look at the list after that session.
Watch later does the same thing but simpler. To me though, those videos are for later. And again it’s not a temporary list. It stays until I clear it out.
Plus, I can only speak for myself here, I tend to watch videos from the home page more often than I do from my watch later list. I then use video recommendations to queue up a list spanning across multiple tabs.
Bringing back the Quick List would merely shrink this down to one tab and make everything so much more manageable.
Lastly, Auto play is great but it doesn't allow you to chose the video that comes up next. And often the Auto Play recommendation isn’t a video that I actually want to see. So therefore, I’ve turned it off. And I’ve noticed that so have most of my friends.
So why did they do it?
I think we’re still viewing this through a narrow lens. A good feature has to be financially viable, useful to the user and easy to implement.
We know that it is quite useful to users because several people have requested it on several forums. And we know that it can be implemented because they’ve done it before.
By financially viable, I mean that it should provide an adequate return to the investment. And it shouldn’t require expensive upgrades because businesses still do need to make a profit. So what I’m trying to say is that financial viability is measured through returns on investment.
So my assumption here would be that it just isn’t financially viable. Making this change must require a mild structural change. And maybe it would make it harder to process.
That doesn’t seem right to me because if you can make a playlist, you’re already making a new database. And if you’re making a queue, you’d be using a similar database that would disappear at the end of each session. In terms of processing requirements, that seems okay to me.
Maybe I’m missing something. But I think that in this situation, it would make sense for them to add this feature. It could be implemented instead of the watch later button on videos during a video watching session. Or alongside it. The details would have to be worked out, I’ll admit.
Or maybe the trade off isn’t worth it. Maybe not enough users would like this feature for it to be profitable or for it to be considered an improvement to the UX.
To me though, it seems doable and quite useful. I think that it will make the product more addictive — not what products should be aiming to be. But that doesn’t change the fact that a more addictive product will, to a certain extent, be more profitable.
What do you think?
A year ago, if I noticed that certain features on a product could’ve been better, I’d have passive aggressively redesigned it and then uploaded it on social media. But now I can acknowledge that it may not be the best way to learn. Because these companies are run by people who are far more skilled than I ever will be and I think it’s fair to assume that they would’ve thougt of the things that I have.
So I want to talk about products. And I want to try to understand why they work the way they do. I feel like that will not only help us understand products better but the people who use them as well.
I now believe that an alternate way to learn would be to decode the reasons why certain companies build products in the way that they do and use that as a means to better understand good design and the real needs/wants of people.
The purpose of this series is to spark a discussion on existing products so please do contribute in the comments section with your opinions and your understanding.
