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Silent trap: The layout was choosing my videos

I fell for a trap I never saw coming, and even when it arrived, it took me a while to notice.

Cabin's initial design

I initially designed Cabin to not be a basic grid of cards. After thinking for a bit, I settled on the following:

  1. One big entry card, featuring the latest addition;
  2. One horizontal row of recent additions excluding the featured one;
  3. And an infinite-scroll grid of the rest of the content.

I also chose to not have any subjective ranking among the included videos, so I left the chronological order as a default.

That became a huge issue.

What broke down, and why

A few, silent psychological issues sneaked in.

The featured card always was the last video and it set the tone for the whole website. That added a silent pressure on me to reach out for more "prestigious" topics - something like science explainers. I had trouble choosing anything else - "this sets a wrong tone for the website. Let me find something that sets the correct one". But that's a wrong question - the layout shouldn't be dictating what I include.

Further: Since the sort order was chronological, it basically followed my watch order, and topics clustered. This created a pretty big problem - Cabin started to develop an identity, accidentally. It started to filter for topics, and became like a science explainers hub. That was NOT a goal. Cabin is supposed to contain ALL kinds of videos, as long as they meet the quality bar.

So, what am I left with? I include mostly science explainers, they are clustered by my watch order, and Cabin has an identity it didn't mean to have. All of a sudden I'm stuck on 3 channels, 1 topic, and can't add anything.

Cabin, and me, are stuck.

The redesign

Took me quite some time to realize - watched some really good videos, still wasn't sure if I should include: "should this topic be included?". THAT SHOULD NOT EVEN BE A QUESTION. If it does its job well, then it should be included. Doesn't matter if I'm interested in the topic or not.

So I observed what was the blocker, and I arrived at the signal. The featured card, and the topic clustering by chronological order would greet anyone with the latest videos I watched and included, which would instantly set the tone for the website. The problem wasn't that I included those topics, the problem was the signal it sent to a newcomer. So I broke down the signal.

Now Cabin is randomly shuffled with an ability to sort by the newest or oldest. There are no featured cards, and every entry is uniform - same size, same card, randomly shuffled per visitor per session. Now even I have no idea what's gonna be shown up at the top, and how the topics will be clustered.

Now the real problem showed - Cabin is too narrow, mostly science explainers. This was the signal for me, the one I wanted - now I'm pushed to discover other topics, to fill the gaps, and bring in a huge variety of interesting topics and videos.

Now I believe Cabin is set up technically, and the only remaining problems are filling the catalog, and marketing..

More of these. Know something that belongs in the catalog? Send it my way.