Rethinking subscriptions

HCI individual project redesigning YouTube's subscription management experience. YouTube gives users almost no control over how their subscribed channels are organized — the result is a long, cluttered list that most people abandon in favor of search or the Home feed. This project ran a full design cycle: survey-based needfinding with 25 participants, heuristic evaluation, three competing low-fidelity prototypes evaluated with 6 participants, and a medium-fidelity final prototype evaluated with 25 more. The winning design pairs a folder-based subscription sidebar with scoped search and filtering — putting users back in control without requiring constant manual upkeep.

My contribution

• ran a 22-question needfinding survey (25 responses) and heuristic evaluation against Nielsen's usability principles — clutter, lack of grouping, and memory burden emerged as the top pain points
• designed and compared three lo-fi prototypes: folder-based sidebar, scoped search + filters, and a subscriptions dashboard — evaluated with 6 participants using a Friedman test across four metrics
• folder prototype won across all measures (ease 4.17, control 4.33, overall preference 4.17) and was selected by 4 of 6 participants as their top choice
• built a medium-fidelity Figma prototype combining the top two concepts: collapsible folder sidebar with channel counts, scoped "search subscriptions" with folder-level filtering, and a "move to folder" overflow menu
• final evaluation (25 participants) showed strongly positive results across all metrics — 96–100% of participants rated key usability dimensions 4 or 5 out of 5