Designing for
clarity
YouTube Premium is a subscription service that offers ad-free viewing, background play, and downloads on YouTube. It also includes access to member exclusive online events and an ad-free experience on YouTube Music Premium.
YouTube’s Premium and Music services have more than 80 million paying subscribers combined.
Challenge
Despite the ever growing number of subscriptions, Premium members and potential members, are unaware of what YouTube Premium offers.
Research shows the top reason for churn or refusal to subscribe, is the feeling that ad-free videos alone is not worth the cost. Growth and retention efforts are struggling.
“I don’t even know where the features are or how to use them. What am I’m paying for?”
— UX Research Participant
Insight
Users are unaware of Premium features because they are unnoticeable across the YouTube experience. It’s unclear what or where Premium features are.
Solution
We can build awareness of Premium features by increasing brand clarity. Components must be distinctly identifiable across YouTube.
Clarity is the key.
Step 1 / Brand
Designing for
distinction
The YouTube brand overall is very broad with a mission to “give everyone a voice and show them the world.” The goal is a YouTube brand that speaks to everyone and everything within the experience is treated the same. However, the YouTube Premium brand only needs to speak to its members and potential members. The Premium experience needs to stand out from the “sameness” experience of YouTube.
“YouTube is looking dated but this feels modern and special…”
— Market Research Participant
Step 2 / Interface
Designing for
integration
Premium features are only one facet of the overall YouTube experience. It’s important to scale easily by embedding the brand language into core components and styles. This ensures quick and consistent implementation of new Premium features that are integrated within system components yet are distinctly identifiable.
Step 3 / Experience
Designing for
awareness
Create an elevated and memorable experience by highlighting Premium features and benefits as they appear across YouTube on all formats. The brand language becomes a recognizable visual cue highlighting benefits to existing members and building familiarity for non-members.
Premium members can clearly identify the features available to them and non-members get a sense of the breadth of benefits offered.
“…this looks valuable and shows more benefits than I thought were offerred…”
— UX Research Participant
Conclusion
By connecting multiple issues into a single insight about awareness, I was able to provide a focused branding effort that solves a variety of problem areas. The new unique brand language will help increase awareness of features and benefits for members and non-members.
Development and marketing teams now have consistent and integrated components to build and highlight new benefits as the Premium service continues to scale.
Designing clarity generates an increase in awareness. More awareness creates an increase in retention and acquisition. Clarity is the key.
My takeaway
The Premium experience is a complex service that spans several product areas within YouTube. Collaboration was essential across multiple teams including core UX system, visual design, branding, product features, growth marketing and external agencies.
This was a great and rewarding challenge to work across a number of teams to establish a clear Premium experience for our members.
Thank you.