* What three adjectives describe the YouTube of today? #youtubetoday
* What three adjectives describe your ideal YouTube of the future? #youtubefuture
We were collecting these responses for an internal "visioning" exercise -- that's a fancy design term for wondering what we'd like to be when we grow up. In other words, we have a pretty good sense of what we are today, but we are looking to explore the possible future paths your experience on YouTube could take in the years to come. We're calling this whole effort YouTube Project v51. For you die-hard YouTube fans and blog followers, you may know that we number major releases and just recently reached v39. Well, we wanted to make sure the team thought way into the future, so we chose v51 as a far-off target. (Plus, it brings to mind Area 51 and futuristic alien technology, which seems appropriate.) There are a lot of different design and research methods we're using in YouTube Project v51, and we're looking forward to sharing some of them with you in the weeks to come.
It was fun and inspiring to see the words you came up with to describe the YouTube of today and the YouTube of tomorrow. We plugged the submitted terms into Wordle, a data visualization tool, to come up with tag clouds, and we want to share them with you.
YouTube of Today:
YouTube of Tomorrow:
Big poster versions of these have been hanging in our office micro-kitchens and lots of entertaining, spirited discussions have happened in response to them. It's one of many ways we work to bring your voice into our day-to-day work. These artifacts serve as reminders of why we do what we do: to provide entertaining and powerful experiences to you, our users.
Take a look and tell us what you think -- how would you describe the YouTube of today and of tomorrow? Post your thoughts in the comments below.
Best,
Margaret Stewart
User Experience Manager
The YouTube Team