YouTube For Kids
**tl;dr:** Kids love Youtube but the YouTube app is unintuitive and frustrating for them to use. I think there's a valid case for a simplified Youtube app to better suit a parent and their child, but not like the YouTube kids apps already out there which are based on channels of pre-selected videos.
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My 2-3 y.o. nephew is similar to a lot of kids in that he loves watching YouTube. Whatever it's Peppa Pig or garbage trucks, there's an endless amount of content to be entertained by. Many, many hours have been spent watching 'The Finger Family'.
Such is the draw, little kids will figure out how to work their way around an app. They can't control their bladder but they can work out how to watch one 'disneycollector' video after another. They can do this only if the app easy to use. My nephew predominantly uses an iPad 1 with the original Apple built YouTube app and that app is just simple enough for him to navigate around to watch video after video. The official app, however, is very frustrating for him. It became unusable many iterations ago and each update takes it even further away from being usable.
A kid this young can learn quickly, but they're depending on what's intuitive to them and the YouTube app is not child intuitive. Tears and cries of despair ensue quickly.
Given how widespread kids using iPads and, in particular, watching YouTube is, I think there is a valid case for a YouTube app that caters for the particulars of how kids and their parents use YouTube. There are existing kid-focussed YouTube apps out there, but they're based on showing preselected videos put into groups. I don't like this, for several reasons: - That's a lot of work to prescreen videos. - The videos that will be included are a generalisation of what the adult curator thinks a kid wants to watch. My nephew watches a lot of videos which wouldn't be classified as kids content, e.g.: garbage trucks crunching up rubbish or workers feeding tree branches into an industrial mulcher. - All kids are different and the best person to curate what they can or can't see is their parent.
I'm making a big assumption that my nephew is representative of a large proportion of young kids. Based on that, there are two main ways that he watches YouTube: - The adult he's with does a search for what he's currently interested in. He then browses through the results and watches videos from that set of videos. - After a few sessions, the video history becomes a valuable resource. It's essentially a curated playlist with high value.
These are the two use cases which form the basis of the app's functionality.
Attached is a basic sketch of app functionality. The top bar contains all the actions which is intend for the parent. Everything below that is the kid's domain; a grid of videos which all launch to a full screen player: - One view that show search results. - One view that shows the history of videos watched. This could be editable so that the parent can curate it to create a high quality, personalised list for future sessions. There's functionality which has been excluded: - No player page which shows related videos: I've found that when my nephew wants to watch tractors, he wants to look solely at tractors. It can great fun for you or me to wind our way from one video to another and find ourselves somewhere completely different from where we started. Not always so for the little ones. Some piece of mind for parents to that this won't happen. - No linking to a YouTube account: It can be annoying for a parent that's logged in with their account to have a whole heap of kids videos interfere with their own history / suggestion engine. - Playlists: Possibly, but for the sake of simplicity, keep as one History page which encompasses everything. - Subscriptions: Possible a good inclusion so you don't miss disneycollector's next unboxing. Still prefer not to have to log in though, so, not included.