“Let’s put a pin in it”: Intuitive Content Saving on YouTube’s Mobile App
By: Kevin Sun
Tags: Kevin Sun, Android, Case Study, Design, YouTube

With over a billion hours of video watched daily, YouTube is one of the largest and most influential content platforms of the modern day. It’s algorithm, while flawed, is regarded as one of the best at determining what its users want to see, consistently delivering new and interesting videos.

However, one thing Google doesn’t (yet) consider is the habits, mood, and free time of their users. It’s quite a common occurrence for a long video to be recommended when users may only have a few minutes on hand. A podcast that shows up while in the mood for spectacle, a movie trailer in the feed when scrolling for background music. These are all cases where the recommended content is interesting and relevant to the user, just at the wrong place or time. They’d love to see it later, and in fact their finger is just hovering over the clip, tempted to throw their responsibilities to the wind and indulge in YouTube’s endless flow of entertainment. But when the finger reaches the screen, it flicks up, sending the unfortunate video careening off the screen into the virtual void, relegated alongside that which is “spam”, “not interested”, and “unappealing”, to sink back beneath the vast ocean of videos in Google’s servers, unlikely to surface again.

A Relic of a Different Era

Credit where credit is due, the problem of saving a video to watch later is something YouTube has thought of long ago, adding the feature under the apt name: “Watch Later”. In fact, this feature has been around since late 2010, over a decade ago at the time of writing. It created an automatically generated private playlist in the user’s account called “Watch Later”, in which videos could be added or removed via a button in the video player. It got translated along to the YouTube official mobile app, which landed on Android at around the same time and onto iOS in late 2012. It put the action of saving to Watch Later into a little three dot menu in the video card, and buried the playlist under the user’s account page, where it remains to this day.

Watch Later Button in YouTube 15.43.32

As you might imagine, a system that was never designed for mobile, adapted in an age when the rules of mobile design were still in the midst of being written, ends up falling a bit short. Don’t get me wrong, it’s perfectly functional, and I myself use it on the daily. However, with the passage of time and how deeply buried the interface is, it’s fallen out of common use, replaced by individualized solutions that bypass the provided option.

Breaking Down the Problem

Users have one of two choices when stumbling across a video they can’t watch right now. They can either let it slide by, hoping for it to stay in the feed until they do, leaving their content at the tender mercies of the Algorithm. Alternatively, they could record it in some way to come back to, either with the built-in solution or a homemade one.

In talking to users, I arrived at several key insights.

It’s remarkable how little people use the inbuilt option.

Several opted to use primarily the Desktop version, allowing them to open many videos in new tabs, coming back to the whole tab at a later date.

Several others took it upon themselves to organize the videos in custom playlists, ignoring the default one provided.

More still opted for the most ancient of solutions, remember the title or channel and search for it later.

It was almost always a time constraint issue.

Nearly every time, the feature YouTube engineers spent many hours building in the early 2010s was replaced in favor of more convenient options, ones that were fewer taps and clicks away.

Building it up from scratch

Given the improvements in app design paradigms over the last decade, what can we do now to implement a mobile first, accessible solution to take the place of YouTube’s Water Later?

Initial Draft of Ideas

Right from the start, one particular solution stood out: pinning. A paradigm popularized by forums and chat clients, whereby a particular piece of content is selected to always show up at the top of the feed. YouTube uses it themselves in their comments section and live chat, used by creators to bring attention to a particular post.

Pinned Post in Live Chat (source: Ninomae Ina’nis Ch.)

In this case, it wouldn’t quite be the traditional use of pinned posts, as those are usually for others to see, rather than for oneself. However, it provides a good basis for which we can build an interaction for keeping videos you want in your feed.

Design Explorations

Alright, we have an idea. Now let’s make it look good. The initial criteria for these entry points is that they’re unobtrusive, easily accessible, and fits in with the existing design language.