Elizabeth Windram

When I started working on social initiatives at YouTube, there were lots of one-off projects and there wasn't a common vision of model of what were working towards building. I started by quickly capturing social relationships on existing products (friendfeed, netflix, amazon, flickr, twitter, facebook, etc.) and then looking at what YouTube would look like under each of these models. Our goal was NOT to try to make YouTube "the next social network." Instead, we wanted to leverage existing social information to make YouTube a better experience for finding and watching great videos.

I took a little bit of time to step back and create a first draft of a model the system (current vs ideal). I then worked closely with the engineering team and the PM to iterate on the model until the team felt it was a good representation of the system we wanted to build. We then used this model to drive many of our open questions, which included: Should we continue to support both subscriptions and friends? What is the value of an account? What types of things can you restrict access to? What types of ACLS do we support? Should ACLs be bi-directional or uni-directional? What are people allowing with ACLs? Do people place ACLs on content/actions or on other people?

Several tactical projects emerged from this project, including the find your friends module and modifications to the subscription process. More details to come on both of those.

I was the one designer working on this. I worked closely with the PM and the engineering team, which was based in Santa Monica.