‘YouCredit’- Earn as You watch— A UX case study
By: Souvik Bera
Tags: Ux Case Study, UX Design, Hackathons, User Experience, UX Research

Solution

We’ve come up with a credit mechanism & we’ve introduced an incentive-based credit model called ‘YouCredit’ wherein a premium user will earn credits at a much faster rate than a non-premium user. Users can then utilize these credits for availing various offerings which also include supporting their favorite content creator. Offering options will be made available to users in their accounts.

But you’ll say for supporting the creators there are popular membership sites outside of YouTube like Patreon. Right? Yes, you’re right. But YouTube also has come up with a new feature which is in-house and keeps the creator and the users on the same platform as their content, it is the ‘sponsor/join’ button where one can take a membership of their favorite creator. You might be thinking then what’s new in ‘YouCredit’?

That’s where you’re wrong kiddo!! 😜

‘YouCredit’ is the system where the user is not spending it from their own pocket rather he/she is earning the credits by giving his/her valuable time. Interesting??

Here Subscribers and fans are given the opportunity to support creators whose content they consume freely. It’s common for subscribers to want to show their appreciation monetarily. So here they can do that by contributing their earned ‘YouCredit’. Having incentives or perks will also appreciate inspiring these followers to contribute. Subscribers get a new vessel to support the creators financially. this transaction of ‘YouCredit’ for rewards strengthens the bond between the creator and subscriber.

Introducing ‘YouCredit’

YouCredit Logo

What is YouCredit?

‘You’ derives from YouTube and ‘Credit’ is the incentive earned. We decided to give it a Golden color to signify earning & to have a premium feel.

So basically, YouCredit refers to the perks that the users receive based on the number of hours he/she watches content on YouTube. The credits earned by the user could be utilized by him/her to purchase coupons or even support their favorite content creator by sending them some credits — this would help the content creator to feel motivated to create more for society.

The amount of credits earned by the regular and premium users would be different. The gap is maintained, keeping in mind that the regular users would get attracted by the kind of luxury premium users are having in order to redeem more benefits by earning more credits within the same time frame.

Extra Features of YouCredit:

The content creators would be given YouCredits, by the supporting users in multiples of 100. YouTube would then monetize the collected credits for a content creator (which will be in multiples of 100). Just to keep the overall process of conversion of credits to money, simple.

In addition to this, since the coupons would start from 1500 YouCredits for premium users (to avail luxury coupons) and 300 YouCredits for regular users (which premium members could also avail) →This is where FOMO comes in and regular users would definitely want to jump into Premium schemes. All the users would be able to use credits effectively from two months of starting to earn credits with this feature.

Also the collected credits expire every 3 months for the user. This would ensure that an opening window is provided for 1 month wherein the user needs to be highly active in order to extract maximum profits.

YouCredit Pricing Strategy (Just an example)

Regular Users: For spending each hour watching a video, a regular user would be credited with 1 ‘YouCredit’ in his/her account.

Credits earned per month by a regular user (user spending 5 hours per day on an average) = 1*5*30 = 150 YouCredits

Credits earned for 2 months = 150*2 = 300 YouCredits

Premium Users: For spending each hour watching a video, a premium user would be credited with 5 ‘YouCredit’ in his/her account.

Credits earned per month by a premium user (user spending 5 hours per day on an average) = 5*5*30 = 750 YouCredits

Thus, on analyzing the gap between the credits earned by the normal and premium users (750–150 = 600), we can say that a FOMO feeling is created for the regular user as he would be tempted to buy premium membership so that he has more control over the variety of options he will be able to redeem.

Control to mitigate the potential Risk:

Keeping in mind the chances of the credit system being misused, we have strategized in raising the price of the coupons so that the user really needs to watch more videos to redeem the coupons.

Also, the upper limit of hours spent per day in order to earn credits is set to 6 hours. This is set in order to ensure that the users are not addicted and stuck in our new model, keeping in mind the well being of the user. Additionally, this would prevent our users from abusing the credit generation system (by simply playing YouTube in the background on PC for hours and generating credits).

Wireframes

Given below are some of the wireframe stages we went through before formulation the final User Interface.

Iterations

We tried out multiple versions (displayed below as stages) for coming up with solutions and then weighed the pros and cons to narrow down on the final wireframes which would be converted into Hi-fi UI.

Stage 1:

Stage 2: After refining