Lesson #1: Create a Better User Experience
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Free Download - The Youngsters Behind YouTube: The Early Years of Chad Hurley and Steve Chen |
“When we started this company a few years ago, we never expected to be here,” says Hurley. “It’s interesting how this simple idea, improving our own video experience online, turned into this.”
Before YouTube came along, online videos were nothing new. Their presence on the Internet had been growing albeit slowly. They were still as of yet cumbersome to upload, while sharing and watching them proved even more difficult. Few people had the patience or the desire to wait out the process.
That was until YouTube burst onto the scene. “I see our service as one that’s been needed for a long time,” says Chen. “The pieces to make it all happen just weren’t in place until we came around.” What Hurley and Chen did was to take a universal problem and create their own efficient and creative solution in YouTube.
The online video experience before YouTube was a poor one for users. Not only would they have to wait for the entire video to download before it could be seen, but they also had to make sure they had the appropriate video players and ‘codecs’ installed on their computer for the files to play. Imagine waiting 30 minutes to watch a video only to have it not work in the end.
Well, Hurley and Chen did not want to imagine that any more. “We needed it to be a no-brainer,” recalls Hurley. With YouTube, users could watch videos almost instantaneously since they used a Flash-based video player that was embedded in their pages. No longer did people have to sit and wait for videos to download, or be told they did not have the correct programs to play them. Users could also embed the YouTube video player into their own external sites.
Since video files were also too large to send by email, a number of other file-hosting services had popped up. However, those too were fraught with difficulties. They would often place limits on the file size of videos that users could upload for free; they could, of course, pay to have those restrictions removed. These sites also had poor user interfaces, no user interaction by way of reviews or ratings, and were largely restricted to being peer-to-peer file sharing.
YouTube not only made it easier to upload videos, but also more interesting and interactive to watch. Now, by tagging files with keywords, users could more easily search for the videos they wanted. Users were also able to rate and review videos, pushing the most popular and relevant ones to the top of the search results. “We allowed the community to tell us what was entertaining them,” says Hurley. They could also share the files simply by sending a link to the video.
Thanks to Hurley and Chen, no longer did you have to have their technological savvy nor the patience of the Dalai Lama to watch a video online. You also do not need to pay a fee or register in order to watch YouTube videos. Hurley and Chen created an unbeatable user experience in YouTube, which kept people coming back for more.
Lesson 1 Create a Better User Experience
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