Reimagining YouTube Community for Mobile
In this project, I redesigned YouTube's Community feature for mobile to solve a critical discoverability problem: most users never find community posts despite creators actively using them to engage audiences.
The goal was to integrate Community posts into the main feed and add dedicated navigation, making creators' polls, photos, and questions as discoverable as videos while maintaining YouTube's familiar interaction patterns.
Client
Personal Project
Type
Product Design
Year
2025
Process
Identifying the Problem
YouTube's Community tab is buried 6 levels deep users must navigate to a creator's channel and scroll past playlists to find posts. Through user research, I identified three pain points: hidden navigation, tiny thumbnails (1/3 screen), and no visual distinction from videos.
Designing the Solution
I developed a two-part approach: (1) Add a Community tab to bottom navigation, reducing access from 6 taps to 1. (2) Integrate posts into the Home feed at a 1:3 ratio one community post between every 2-3 videos. To prevent pattern blindness, I applied a light blue-gray background to community posts while keeping videos white.
Building the Prototype
I built an interactive prototype using Lovable with React and Tailwind CSS. The prototype includes two functional tabs, animated like buttons, expandable post modals with comments, and infinite scroll. I iterated on width consistency, poll interaction design, and micro-animations to ensure the interface felt polished and production-ready.
Outcome
WORK OUTCOME
The finalized redesign includes a Community tab in the bottom navigation, community posts integrated into the Home feed, and subtle visual differentiation through background color.
This system reduces discovery friction from 6+ taps to 1 tap, increases visibility by placing posts where users already spend their time, and maintains familiar YouTube interaction patterns.
Expected impact: 10x increase in community post visibility, 3x increase in engagement rate, and 500M+ additional post views daily (based on YouTube's scale). The prototype demonstrates how strategic navigation placement and subtle visual design can solve discoverability problems without disrupting core user behavior.
