YouTube
Designing the Foundation for the YouTube TV experience that scaled to 8M Subscribers
Launched in April 2017, YouTube TV quickly gained traction, expanding to 98% of U.S. households by January 2019. Its subscriber base surpassed 1 million in March 2019 and reached a remarkable 8 million by May 2024.
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Role
Founding Designer
Date
2015 – 2017
People's Voice Winner for Best Streaming Video in 2018 after launch.
YouTube TV grew 48% from the prior year, with a 92% retention rate.
At the end of 2023, YouTube TV reported more than 8 million subscribers
Highlights
My role was multifaceted, requiring a balance between defining the overall vision, establishing a structured design process, recruiting contributors, and providing hands-on design for key features such as onboarding, family plans, the player, the TV guide and more. A strong emphasis was placed on ensuring high quality throughout the product making design a core differentiator and fostering innovation in collaboration with PMs and engineers.
Drawing upon prior TV product design experience from Android TV and Xbox, I conceptualized the initial design, including the core app structure and mental model, and secured leadership approval, leading to a fully staffed cross-functional team by mid-2016.
A Clear Mental model
Research on TV viewing habits informed a strategy to support multiple content discovery methods with easy switching between them. While initial tests of a reduced navigation showed slight drawbacks, I strongly believed that a more elegant and simple design was worth trying, so I took it upon myself to continue iterating on the idea and evangelizing it with stakeholders, and was ultimately successful in iteratively designing a future-proofed main navigation that eventually tested as easier to use. This "past, present, future" mental model (Library, Home, Live) became the app's core navigation which has remained unchanged over the last 8 years.
A Novel TV Guide
Spearheaded the design of the TV channel guide, ensuring optimal performance on touchscreens while seamlessly adapting to desktop and TV d-pad navigation. This innovative guide departed from traditional industry standards by incorporating live video previews of everything that's live now on TV and contextual future scheduling across the network’s detail pages. Awarded two patents for a highly intuitive and visually fluid channel-flipping browsing mechanism, significantly streamlining implementation for engineers.
Signup experience
The YouTube TV onboarding experience needed to be user-friendly and scalable for future growth. Simplifying complex choices, highlighting the value proposition, and offering clear package options was critical to inspire new users to sign up and subscribe.
To ensure users could quickly understand base channel lineups and find favorite add-ons, I relentlessly prioritized, slashing onboarding steps and strategically moving some inside the app. Through a series of A/B tests and experiments, we reached 1,722,499 total signups in the first 12 months.
mkleinerman —© 2025.