“Where are my YouTube Videos?” #UXFAIL

If you’ve ever uploaded a video on YouTube, you may have found it difficult to find that video in your YouTube account later on after you’ve uploaded it. We can tell this is not a unique ‘user issue’ because if you Google “Where are my YouTube Videos?”, you will see step-by-step instructions and even video tutorials (shown below) on how to find the videos you uploaded to your YouTube account. To be clear, we’re not talking about trying to find your videos as if you were someone searching on YouTube that may be looking for a video like yours. We’re talking about finding a video in your YouTube account after you’ve uploaded it so that you can edit it or delete it or whatever.

The fact that Google had to write step-step-step instructions on something that should be so simple proves there’s a design flaw.

In addition, if there are people posting video tutorials that are viewed by hundreds of thousands of frustrated people, you have a major UX problem.

So, Where Are My Videos?

For some reason, not only are your videos buried in a link under your profile’s avatar but they’re in what appears to be a separate software product called “YouTube Studio beta“. How someone would know to go to the YouTube Studio beta product to find the videos they uploaded is one problem. The fact that YouTube is requiring its users to access a ‘beta’ version of this product as the only means to get to these videos, is a whole other problem. At UX Team, we often create video demonstrations or usability test recordings for our clients that we purposely keep “unlisted” so only someone with the direct link to the video can view that video. Apparently, the only way to find and edit these “unlisted” videos in your account is to use the YouTube Studio beta product. The problem is that most users probably think of “YouTube” as the whole product and not that there are sub-products within YouTube to do special things. This just adds an unnecessary level of confusion to the whole user experience.

The Simple Solution

Since we are a UX Design firm, we don’t want to just rant about the failures of others, we want to offer our help. In this case, the solution could be as simple as adding a ‘My Videos’ link to the main navigation menu. If YouTube did this, we bet there would be a lot less people asking and searching for where to find their own videos.

== UPDATE! ==

YouTube must have gotten feedback (or read this post :-) ) because they just updated their main navigation menu to include a “Your videos” link!

Bravo YouTube, Bravo!