YouTube — Redesigning the Download Feature.
I commute an hour each way and rely on YouTube's offline downloads to get through it. Videos vanishing on their own and deleting them one at a time kept bothering me enough that I turned it into a full case study — interviews, a redesigned deletion flow, a faster way to reorder.
This wasn't a client brief — it's an independent case study I ran on a feature I use almost daily. I interviewed and surveyed other commuters who download YouTube videos for offline viewing, then designed and prototyped a fix in Figma. The original write-up is on Medium →
What kept happening
Downloaded videos couldn't be saved to local device storage, and disappeared on their own if left unwatched too long. On a route with patchy signal, losing a video I'd deliberately downloaded defeated the point of downloading it.
What made it worse
Deleting was one video at a time, no batch option. Resolution couldn't be changed after downloading. Reordering a queue of a few videos took 10 taps across 11 screens — more effort than just rewatching whatever was already first in line.
Checking it wasn't just me
Before designing anything, I ran interviews and a survey with other people who download YouTube videos for offline viewing. The same five complaints came up independently — this wasn't one commuter's pet peeve.
Mapping the real cost in steps
Traced the existing flows screen by screen instead of going on feel: deleting a video took 3 taps across 4 screens, reordering took 10 taps across 11. That gap between what it should take and what it actually took became the design target.
Designing around Haikal
Built the redesign around Haikal, a 27-year-old commuter persona pulled from the interviews — an hour each way, tutorial and gaming content, wants videos ready to go without fighting the app to manage them.
Two ways to delete, depending on the situation: swipe a single video away in place, or switch to multi-select to clear several at once instead of repeating the same flow one video at a time. Reordering became drag-and-drop directly in the list, instead of routing through a separate screen for every move.
Delete a video
Reorder the queue
Step counts mapped directly from the existing flow vs. the redesigned one — not estimates.
I also considered two options I didn't ship. An auto-save toggle that would let a video skip the expiry countdown entirely — closer to a real fix for the “videos vanishing” complaint — but it meant reworking how the app manages local storage limits, further than I could responsibly scope without access to YouTube's actual storage architecture. And a dedicated “manage downloads” screen, separate from the main library — cleaner in isolation, but it added a screen to remember instead of removing friction from the one people already use. Swipe-to-delete and drag-to-reorder won because they fixed the two most-cited complaints without asking Haikal to learn a new part of the app.
This was a proposal, not a shipped feature — YouTube doesn't take outside redesigns, and I don't have adoption numbers to report. What it did do: turn a recurring commute annoyance into a fully scoped problem with real numbers behind it, and confirm through other commuters that the friction wasn't just in my head.
Not every case study starts with a client brief. This one started with being annoyed on the same train ride for months. Treating my own friction as a real research question — checking it against other people instead of assuming they felt it too — is what turned a complaint into something worth showing. The honest limit: I validated the problem with other commuters, but the solution itself was only ever tested against my own workflow and a prototype — no usability testing loop, because there was no team or budget behind it. I'd treat that gap the same way on a real job: ship the fix, then go find out if it actually holds up once people who aren't me are using it.
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