Opportunity: UX/UI design, Art direction (Mobile)
Challenge: 10X creation by designing an AI playground on YouTube main app
Role: Lead Product Designer (YouTube / GenAI Creation Team)
AI Playground is a new YouTube surface dedicated to inspiring creativity through AI. Enabling media generation, it serves as a container for exploration, empowering creators to experiment in ways that feel novel, playful, and uniquely assistive.
About the Team
As the product design lead on the Media Generator team at YouTube, I worked with a team of researchers, content designers, PMs, and engineers to design, validate, and implement the project.
My Role
I led the UX and visual design from vision to implementation, initially proposing the idea for creating a dedicated mode within the YouTube creation flow. I then created prototypes to showcase the vision to XFN partners and stakeholders, which then turned into our most critical project on the YouTube creation roadmap.
Process
The team went through rounds of iterations on the design, designing within the short-term constraints vs building scalability for future milestones as we continue to develop more new ways of creation.
Content Strategy
In collaboration with our content designer, I developed a scalable framework that not only streamlined the user experience but also laid the foundation for future growth. Rooted in our product principles, the system balances consistency with flexibility, ensuring we can meet evolving user expectations and technological advances.
Options
We explored multiple visualization approaches for these modules and iterated extensively to identify the design format that both enhanced the user experience and inspired creativity.
Information Architecture
The framework was built as a series of interchangeable modules, each tailored to a key stage of the user experience: from setting expectations, to driving discovery, simplifying navigation, and empowering creation, and learning.
OOBE
Anchors users in the experience by clearly defining what they can expect.
