Video publishing experience

VideoMyJob

UI/UX Design

CASE STUDY

Project overview

Publishing and sharing videos is a core part of the video creation journey within VideoMyJob. Videos created by users need to be shared with others in order for them to experience the core value of the product. Through user interviews, we were able to uncover several problems with this part of the video creation journey. It was my task to design an improved video sharing experience.

Process

Conduct user interviews
Clearly understand the functionality of publishing/sharing within the product
Identify friction in the sharing journey with user scenarios
Conduct competitor research
Ideate with sitemaps/low fidelity wireframes
Test high fidelity designs with stakeholders and users
Iterate and finalise design that addresses problems with current publishing/sharing journey.

User interviews

At VideoMyJob, our product north star is 'Make it easy to make a video'. Video creation is at the very core of our product. To help us uncover and understand problems users face during this process, I conducted several user interviews. Common issues arose across video recording, editing and sharing. We were able to implement several small improvements that addressed these using an ICE prioritisation table which we used to determine which improvements would have the most impact and weigh that up against the confidence we had that it would succeed and the ease of implementing it.

User interview documentation

Different issues around sharing and publishing came up with 20% of users interviewed saying that the publishing workflow was confusing and 53% saying that publishing terminology lacked clarity. Working closely with the CS team, I was able to gather more feedback from first time users, uncovered during implementation.

Insights

First time users are afraid of tapping 'publish' because they don't know who would be able to see their video.
Users don't understand the benefits of publishing their video.
Users had difficulty understanding how to simply share a link to their video from the app.
Users were hesitant to even upload their video because they didn't want other team members seeing their video.

Understanding the functionality of publishing and sharing

At the core of VideoMyJob's publishing feature is the ability to publish a video directly to another platform (YouTube, Facebook and Vimeo). But publishing also served other purposes; it enabled the collection of analytics on a video, it moved a video out of a 'Draft' state and it allowed the user to perform other actions that are not available on unpublished videos. The complexity behind publishing, made improving this feature even harder. For example;

Many users were publishing their video to YouTube as an 'unlisted' video, not because they wanted their video on YouTube but because they wanted to enable analytics on their video.
We motivated users with a team leaderboard that was based on videos published. But many teams had no reason to publish their video to YouTube, instead they were downloading or sharing a link to their video. They were not receiving recognition for the videos they were creating.

'Sharing' a video is a lot less complex. The user is able to copy or share a link with their video on a stand alone VideoMyJob page. This could be used when asking for feedback or when sharing a finished video with no need to publish it directly to another platform.

User scenarios

I created several user scenarios to understand problems within the different ways that users were using the publishing feature. I based these scenarios on the user interviews I conducted and from insights gathered by other team members. The user scenario below looked at a first time user that was asked to create their first video and share it with their manager for feedback. It highlighted an issue with the layout of the 'video details' page which put great prominence on the publishing button, but hides other sharing options needed behind a 'more options' icon. Users struggle to figure out how to share their video. This led to a poor first time experience.

First time user sharing video for feedback

The user scenario diagrams helped me clearly articulate all the problems users face during the publishing/sharing journey.

Competitor research

I took a look at how other video platforms handled the different functionality that related to our current publishing system. An interesting difference with the competitors products was that analytics were always available on videos as soon as they were uploaded, rather than having to be published.

Ideation and internal testing

The Head of Product and I brainstormed ideas that we felt addressed the problems our users were facing. The key ideas were:

allowing users to mark their video as 'Finished' if they had no need to publish it
increasing the visibility of sharing options
introducing a privacy option
allowing analytics to be available as soon as the user finishes their video.

After fleshing out the basic structure with a sitemap, I created some low fidelity sketches to explore different layouts. When I felt I was ready to flesh the layouts further, I dove into high fidelity designs in Sketch.

V1 High Fidelity Screens

The first design solved several problems but after getting feedback from stakeholders, it was clear that some of the terminology and functionality was confusing. I used this feedback to iterate on a second design.

V2 High Fidelity Screens

The second design stripped back some of the complexity and re ordered the user flow slightly. I received further feedback from stakeholders to inform the next design.

V3 High Fidelity Screens

The third iteration tested the best in terms of clarity and additional feedback was minimal. This version also included all secondary screens that had not been designed up until this point.

Video Details Old & New

Testing with customers

Next I tested the latest iteration with three customers. While they all agreed the new features and general UX improvements were great, there was confusion on a handful of key aspects of the UI:

'Finish/Publish' functionality is unclear
the privacy option is easily missed when creating a video
the wording for hiding/showing a video is unclear.

This testing led to the fourth iteration of the designs.

Privacy Option v3 and v4

The app designs were then translated to the web app.

V4 Web App Designs

Conclusion

I believe the improvements I made to the publishing/sharing experience had a high impact for many users. Unfortunately I resigned from VideoMyJob before I could see my designs be implemented and measure their success. Given the research I conducted and feedback received from users, I have high confidence that my designs greatly improved the core experience of publishing/sharing a video within VideoMyJob.

The metrics I would have tracked as a goal to measure the success of the redesign include:

50% reduction in videos published 'unlisted' with the hypothesis that users were previously doing so simply to enable analytics on their video. In the new design, analytics are always enabled so this would not be necessary.
Increase amount of users that have created at least one video by 10% with the hypothesis that having the privacy option will make them less hesitant to upload their video.
20% adoption of new privacy feature with the hypothesis that users will find value in it when creating their first video, when iterating on their video and when creating a video with sensitive content.
70% of videos created to be marked as 'complete' with the hypothesis that users will find value in marking a video as 'complete' to better manage their videos or to signify that a video has been approved and ready to share.
Decrease 'first video creation to sharing' funnel completion time by 10% with the hypothesis that improvements made to video details UI will mean first time users will know how to share their video from the app.