Reimagining YouTube Community for Mobile
In this project, I redesigned YouTube's Community feature for mobile to solve a critical discoverability problem: 90% of users never find community posts despite creators actively using them to engage with audiences.
The goal was to integrate Community posts into the main feed and elevate the feature in the app's navigation
ensuring creators' polls, photos, questions, and announcements reach the people who want to see them.
Through user research and interaction design, I developed a mobile-first prototype that makes community content as discoverable as videos while maintaining YouTube's familiar patterns.
Client
Personal Project
Type
Product Design
Year
2025
Process
Identifying the Problem
YouTube's Community tab is buried 6 navigation levels deep. To access posts, users must navigate to a creator's channel, scroll past playlists, and find a tiny horizontal scroll section—or swipe through 6 tabs to reach "Posts." As a result, even engaged subscribers never see community updates.
Through behavioral observation and testing with YouTube power users, I identified three pain points: hidden navigation, microscopic thumbnails (1/3 screen width), and no visual distinction between posts and videos.
Designing the Solution
I developed a two-part approach: (1) Add a Community tab to the bottom navigation, making posts accessible with one tap instead of six. (2) Integrate community posts into the Home feed with a 1:3 ratio—one community post appears naturally between every 2-3 videos.
To prevent pattern blindness, I added subtle visual distinction: community posts have a light blue-gray background (#F8FAFB) while videos stay white. This tint helps users instantly recognize community content when scanning the feed.
Building the Prototype
I built an interactive prototype using Lovable with React and Tailwind CSS. The prototype includes two functional tabs (mixed Home feed and dedicated Community feed), working like animations, expandable post modals with comments, and infinite scroll. I populated it with outdoor/camping creators posting polls, photos, and questions—demonstrating how the system works across different content types.
I iterated on three key areas: width consistency (ensuring all cards are identical size), poll interaction design (making voting feel tactile), and micro-interactions (smooth like button animations with scale and color transitions).
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.
