Youtube Music
Youtube Music
Artist Recap is one of YouTube’s biggest projects with 617K eligible artists worldwide throughout the platform. Recap aims to celebrate artists with metrics and unique visual branding. Originally started in 2021, each year aims to make incremental improvements.
Project Overview
Challenge
Make Recap even more captivating, customized, and easy to use.
How can we increase engagement with artists?
Solution
Looking at the metrics/design from last year, I knew the biggest upgrade would to make each page shareable.
Add “Share” CTA to every screen instead of just the last page (2023 Recap)
Highlight Shorts creators to bridge the gap between artists and their biggest supporters
Collaborate with the localization team to design cohesion across 133 languages
Team
Art Director - Gabriela Namie
Visual Designer - Alexis Jamet
Graphic Designer - Minkwan Kim
Content Designer(s) - Colleen Clark, Elise Gray
UX Designer(s) - Myself, Kaiwei Wang
Time
4 Months
Task
Increase engagement for Artist Recap 2024
Tools
Figma, Internal Google Research
Impact
+71% Participants
From 69% previous year (2023)
+25K Active Users
From 10K last year
+11,506 Clicks
From 1,128 previous year (2023)
Bridging The Gap
As someone who spent the past 8 years working in the music industry, I utilized my connections to interview a multitude of Artists/Musicians to gather their thoughts on YouTube Recap. Some of the people I interviewed included Toro Y Moi, Helado Negro, Brijean, Colde, Dizzy Fae & More.
Below are some of the takeaways from those conversations.
“I want to see where my fans are”
— Hunjiya (11.8k listeners)
“Recap should be a humble brag. I want to share my metrics and celebrate the community”
— Brijean (219.9k Listeners)
“It’s incredibly interesting to see what my biggest streaming days are”
— Tony F (67.5k Listeners)
Entry Points
To increase engagement this year we introduced 3 different notifications to bring attention to this years Artist Recap.
Celebrating Achievements
As much as this is a YouTube project, it’s even more an individual journey. The goal of Recap is make each slide interesting and captivating. By creating exciting visuals we’re able to flex our design skills and make data fun.
Shareable Assets
One of the fun challenges was considering how to introduce consumers to the concept of Total Reach. At YouTube we present the unique ability to combine metrics from videos, shorts, and the music platform. Our solution to this was to create two flows. One that artists see, and a different flow when they choose to share a screen.
Final Thoughts
It was an absolute dream to launch Artist Recap 2024. Being part of a giant corporation there were a lot of cooks in the kitchen, and this project is an example of high level collaboration. That being said, there were certainly things I would have liked to implement with more time.
Animation
Consumer recap was able to achieve some really exciting interaction animations on their side. Artist Recap is part of the Data Stories team, meaning our developers were under different constraints.
UXR
Although we didn’t have time for a proper UXR before launch, I took it upon myself to interview all of the artists I know, big and small. I would have liked to have proper sessions with a seasoned UX team on these calls.