The Youtube User Experience, an Inspiration for Online Publishers
Youtube is the biggest video sharing platform on the planet. Their success is the result of investing time and resources on how to provide the best user experience possible (UX) and on reinventing themselves constantly. Why should Youtube be a source of inspiration for publishers?
Publishers’ pursuit of stickiness
Every publishers’ guideline is to offer their visitors high quality content that best fits their audience needs. Creating an outstanding experience is key to reach engagement and sustain a virtuous circle: happy visitors are returning visitors who attract happy advertisers and make publishers happy. In other words, the more content visitors will consume, the more revenue publishers will get. Video is a great opportunity to catch the audience’s attention and create deep interactions.
The video shift is no trivial matter, but Youtube successfully addressed the challenge. From that example we highlighted 3 points that deserve thoughtful consideration:
• How does being user-centric help win the heart of the audience?
• Why are personalized suggestions key for retention and conversion?
• To what extent can publishers adopt Youtube’s model?
User is King
The fact that Youtube is the second most visited website in the world is mainly due to the outstanding UX they have developed. Whether you are watching a video or uploading content, the experience is always intuitive and smooth, promoting the creation of more videos and encouraging users to spend more time on the platform by suggesting videos they are algorithmically going to like.
Indeed, Youtube managed to create a unique and complete viewing experience tailored to the way their users consume videos. They offer content that is easily findable, viewable and shareable through social media, email or external websites. They differentiate themselves with 3 major advantages: a clean and sharp design that helps users focus on content, a performant search engine and an intelligent recommendation system that almost magically guesses what users want to watch next.
Better than users,Youtube has fans
The whole experience was designed for the user’s comfort. They have managed to build more than a regular audience by promoting interactions through comments, likes, shares: they have fans, active users who are genuinely enthusiastic and addicted to the brand.
Publishers need to leverage their user experience on site to enhance their brand and broaden their fans community. Youtube achieved what every publisher pursues today by knowing their users : who they are, what they want, and what they want to watch.
