5 - David Earle

In our project 3 redesign of YouTube, we chose to focus our attention on the playlist creation and editing tools provided by YouTube. In our original redesigns, we chose to completely get rid of the playlist editing page because we found that there were not enough essential features that passed the '60 second test' for there to be a separate page for this. Instead, we used the 'Unnecessary Test' to weed out the vital features of this page (change order of video's, delete, add, and create a new playlist)  and added them to the playlist options on the classic video watching page. While this first design adjustment contributed to the simplicity of the site by removing pages, we ended up with a more cluttered video display page (when watching from a playlist). In order to resolve this problem, we performed 'interface surgery' on our newly cluttered page, which resulted in us developing our intuitive drag and click option (inspired by mobile devices touchscreen possibilities). This returned the page to its clear layout (without all the added buttons), while retaining all the new features that enabled a user to alter playlists while watching them.
This project seemed to follow Hoekman's advice of aiming low, and only building whats absolutely necessary by improving functionality without adding new clutter and removing unnecessary/redundant pages. Nevertheless, our user testing revealed that many users did not use our click and drag features, because there was nothing there to inform them that these features existed. Instead they tried to edit a playlist the same way they always had. This highlighted Hoekman's comment, in the previous chapter, about users finding a way to accomplish a task and then sticking to it. As well as his warning that "ripping functionality out of an existing application [...] could have the negative side effect of making some of your users extremely upset" (Hoekman 90). We learned both of these things the hard way. So instead of removing the tried and true way of editing YouTube playlists -which has become so many users mental model for how the site works-, we decided to add our new 'drag and click' manipulations as a complement to the existing way of doing things. While this makes it seem like we simply added more features to the site -the opposite of our objective-, we believe that our redesign was guided by aiming low. Instead of new feature, what we believe we have designed is a new, more focused, and obvious application.
If YouTube were not a heavily used and well established application, we would use the 'Unnecessary Test' to get rid of the current Edit Playlist page, which would be replaced with our solution. However this is not the case, therefore we have retained the method which our loyal users have already learned to use. Nevertheless if there had to be a feature dropped from this page it would be the ability to edit the video's length and start and end point within the playlist. While this may seem like a worthwhile tool, it is unnecessary and will only be used by expert users.
These techniques should be used repeatedly and recursively throughout the entirety of the design process, preferably before a design is significantly invested in and implemented.