Onboarding the next generation to Youtube as Careeer.

This project was part of 10kdesigners, a UI/UX design cohort.

In this case study I will explain you process of designing YourPeer, a mobile app which lets user book 1:1 with Youtubers and start Youtube channel.

Youtube has changed learning and acquiring skills for so many people like me. From watching scientific videos on Kurtezegarts to watching reaction videos to relax, Youtube has slowly became lifestyle to us than a just video content app. In past few years, we have significant increase in India’s approach to Youtube. Here are few stats around Youtube

KPMG projects India’s online video viewing audience to cross 550 million by 2023. Of this, 60–70 percent would be on YouTube.

With India’s vast and diverse content market opportunities are seamless and never ending. The best thing about Youtube is your interests are the product. There has been significant rise in demand of regional content.

India’s Youtube industry is booming, what is the problem, well it’s starting out. The first step towards anything has been most difficult to many people. Many young creators find it difficult to get proper guidances and feedback on their content. Here are the common pain points many beginner creators faces following issues

picking up niche, many creators are not confident on niche to pick or how to manifest their content into product that scales on Youtube medium.

lack of skilled video product, creators who have Youtube channel but lacks skills like proper video editing, script etc.

proper use of Youtube setup like camera, camera stand, softwares to use etc.

So, based on initial research, it was evident that there was lack of mentorship which many Youtube aspirants faced. To know more on this I researched a bit more about are there any products which are solving this.

Make Youtube as career medium accessible to more

To understand about Youtube Industry and it’s potential from Indian context.

enable more and more people connect with Youtubers and gain insights

A mobile app, where anyone can discover and explore Youtubers and book 1:1 on call with them based on Youtube skills they want to know about and gain knowledge.

1:1 mentoring helps people open up about their actual doubts and pain points.

Connecting with someone who you inspires you, motivates people to take action

Online communities helps people to get frequent feedback on their work, clear out doubts and most importantly it helps self-doubt which many creators faces when starting out.

In house activities like friendly audio rooms, casual polls helps more and more creators.

Access to exclusive communities by prominent Youtubers, adds value to long-term growth for aspirant.

Opportunity for mentor to monetise their content and have active mentor-mentee community.

Once I have finished my online research and validating the problem statement, I started curating questions regarding the user, features and more to get more insights about requirement of user.

People’s views on current solutions like masterclasses, online courses on Youtube where important as it would help me understand the fundamental problems with such courses and how I can solve it.

From above comments, I got few things clear about what people want and what current products are not providing.

Most of the people want live interaction with someone who has started experience with Youtube, and not just advice and want actual hands on related to skill.

People care less about material offering, they want community interaction around the Youtube (or content creation skills in general) to get motivated about creating content.

Lack of community and informal forums and discussions. Most of this platform have no effective forum where people can interact and get their doubts clear

To validate my problem statement, I looked for probable products which exists in market today. I looked for statistics from verified sources like Statista, Youtube’s annual Reports to gain insight both about the market and it’s demand in India.

In past few years, various prominent have started mentoring people about Youtube skills and have mentored hundreds of people. To name few,

Ali Abdaal, has runs a cohort “Part time Youtuber Academy”, where he mentors people about Youtube and helps people start and grow their Youtube channel.

Ankur Warikoo, a well known founder turned Youtuber had mentored people about Youtube and started a mentoring course.

Aevy TV, a Youtube channel founded by Indian Entrepreneur Varun Mayya, started video-editing cohort, where they mentored people about Youtube level video-editing.

During my research, I found interesting data points related to growth of Youtube, which further validates use case and potential of such app.

I further researched a bit more on platform side which provides mentoring services. To my surprise, there are far less mentoring platforms for mentoring. Here is the competitor analysis for products which provide mentoring services.

Most of this apps are follow web focused approach. There are no mobile first approach in this section.

Majority of internet users in India are from smartphones, moreover, major chunk of such users from from remote areas of nation

most of above apps are creator focused and provides less discoverability to learner.

Majority of resources on this were self paced courses and most of the users found it less effective.

Most of the practical bootcamps are expensive.

Once, I was done with the research and user interviews, I started collecting inspirations so as to gain how the video based edtech industry worked. I explored all kind of apps from on demand video courses like Udemy, Coursera to live mentor based apps like Unacademy, Masterclass, and even community led apps like Cameo and Discord, so as to gain insights on what engages with users on such platforms and what misses.

Now that I had sufficient information and patterns at my table, I started organising this information, so as to create base of the product. This stage involved lots of critical thinking and during this face I got to know about the fundamentals of how important organising and structuring user research insights is.

Now, that I have explored and played with different design patterns, next thing was to finalise style and overall vibe of the app, now as the product’s main intent was to connect people and keep things interactive, I explored colours and themes which vibe with Youtube. Here is what I finalised

Thoughts on overall onboarding design experience

A logo which communicates the idea of the product and tells about what the product is about and at the same time is friendly enough as mentoring is generally taken as something which serious, well it is not with YourPeer.

The onboarding of the app, should tell the core offerings of product and at the same time telling users about what they will be getting from app.

The reason behind having mobile OTP based login was most of the users don’t check email frequently and most of the time important updates get ignored.

Now, here is the login flow

Thinking and designing this part of project

Asking user’s interests/skills helps in recommending better mentors and resources to them which further helps in making it easier for user to decide upon.

This section of app is made skippable as there might be instance where user doesn’t know what skill they want to learn or have vague idea of niche and want to go through entire catalog of the app.

Now, came the Creator’s page part. This was the screen at which user gets all the information about the mentor. 

This screen is were user can see all of his progress, right from the all the bookings and tasks assigned by mentors to performance grades by mentors and algorithm rating of user on important Youtube skills so as to bring quality feedback and self reflection to user's learning.

That's it, this project further involved Community feature so as to user can interact within the in-app students to upskill.

If you liked it. Do share it with others. Also, I am open to freelance design projects, if you are someone who liked my work. You can reach out to me on Contra or on Twitter/X .