Shopping Ads on YouTube

Who

I currently lead UX Design for Shopping Ads on YouTube. I work alongside other UX Designers, Researchers, Product Managers and Engineers.

What

YouTube’s ecosystem relies on balancing the needs of Users, Creators and Brands – my job is to create engaging and helpful experiences between users and brands. If successful, this helps users discover something new, brands reach new customers, and creators get compensated for their content.

Challenges

Improving the consumer facing experience is actually easy. But maintaining a complex multi-user platform worth hundreds of billions of dollars is hard.

Viewers, creators and brands power the vast ecosystem that is YouTube, and if we lose focus on one of these users, it can have a chain reaction. For example, if we reduce ad load to respond to Viewer needs we may gain positive user sentiment, but brands will find it slower and more expensive to reach customers. They will then respond by shifting their budget elsewhere, leading to fewer and less relevant ads on YouTube and less revenue for creators. Creators will then begin looking to alternative platforms, and their viewers will follow.

Adding to this complexity is the challenge of updating advertiser-placing platforms. Even minor changes to these systems can up-end deep-seated processes in businesses across the world. For example, updating image aspect ratios or text requirements would take multiple years and the coordination of many many departments – no easy task.

So how do we respond to these challenges?

1. Research that is viewer-first, but still validated across all user groups
2. A multi-pronged strategy acknowledging the long time-frame of fundamental changes alongside consistent improvements

For example, improving layouts and the presentation of images can be done incrementally:

While new experiences like first-party brand shops will take significant time and investment:

Achievements

• Launched a new experience – a major achievement for the industry with wide media coverage
• Planned and facilitated multiple workshops with teams across the company to understand and align on priorities
• Built a strategic roadmap that takes into account the best of YouTube, and the opportunities within the industry
• Generated ideas and visuals discussed at the c-suite and industry level

Case study?

Want a case study? Please reach out and and I’d be happy to walk you through some of the work and context.