Nate Koechly and Matthew Darby: YouTube's UX Director and Director of PM on redesigning one of the world's most-used apps
Design BetterShow Notes
Redesigning one of the world’s most-used apps is no small feat, especially when that app is also the second largest search engine in the world: YouTube. Over the last four years, Nate Koechly, UX Director at YouTube, and Matthew Darby, Director of Product Management, have been leading an ambitious effort to balance Google’s metrics-driven culture with the subjective challenge of making an app feel “modern.”
Visit our Substack for bonus content and more: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/nate-koechly-and-matthew-darby
In our conversation, Nate and Matt share how they developed predictive measurement tools to gauge user perception, why they pair visual updates with quality-of-life features like comment threading and improved video controls, and how their research process has evolved from measuring clicks to understanding satisfied watch time.
We also dig into one of YouTube’s most complex challenges: the algorithm. As Nate and Matt explain, what users say they want doesn’t always match what actually makes them happy on the platform. They also discuss their work exploring ways to give viewers more agency and control, including the possibility of using natural language to tune your feed.
Both guests have a genuine passion for how YouTube enables deep expertise and niche interests to find their audiences—from 3D models of the Golden Gate Bridge to forest fire education from Northern California lookouts. Behind the algorithms and design updates is a platform where, as Nate puts it, “when you give people a voice, the things they say are just inspiring.”
***
Premium Episodes on Design Better
This ad-supported episode is available to everyone. If you’d like to hear it ad-free, upgrade to our premium subscription, where you’ll get an additional 2 ad-free episodes per month (4 total). Premium subscribers also get access to the documentary Design Disruptors and our growing library of books:
You’ll also get access to our monthly AMAs with former guests, ad-free episodes, discounts and early access to workshops, and our monthly newsletter The Brief that compiles salient insights, quotes, readings, and creative processes uncovered in the show. And subscribers at the annual level now get access to the Design Better Toolkit, which gets you major discounts and free access to tools and courses that will help you unlock new skills, make your workflow more efficient, and take your creativity further.
Upgrade to paid
***
If you’re interested in sponsoring the show, please contact us at: [email protected]
If you’d like to submit a guest idea, please contact us at: [email protected]
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
More from Design Better
Tom Foley didn’t set out to design typefaces. As a postgraduate student at Central Saint Martins in London, he was researching why Ireland, unlike Switzerland, the Netherlands, or Germany, never seemed to have a confident typographic voice of its own.
Kevin Flores has been part of the Design Better community for years — we first met him in 2017, while he was leading design at 23andMe, back when we were researching how design teams are structured for the Design Genome Project. So it’s a real pleasure to finally have him on the show to talk about his new book, Find Your Inner Rebel.
In graduate school, Randy Hunt poured his heart and soul into a poster for Milton Glaser’s class, a picture built entirely from hand lettering that read as an image from across the room and as words up close. Glaser glanced at it, said, “Well, that’s not very good,” and moved on to the next student.
When Aarron was fresh out of grad school, working at an agency outside Philadelphia, he and his coworkers used to crowd around a monitor to study volumeone.com. Most websites back then had a picture, maybe an image map. Matt Owens’s site had 3D, animation, and experimental graphic design, and none of us could figure out how he made it.
Blaine Billingsley is a staff designer at OpenAI, and his path there was anything but a straight line. He studied music composition and comparative religion, played guitar in Texas for a living (he remembers checking his bank account, seeing seven dollars, and feeling pumped), then drove to San Francisco and took a data entry job at a startup.