YouTube Music made better

This redesign was my way of exploring how a few thoughtful changes could make the app smoother, simpler, and more enjoyable to use. This was a personal project, done out of curiosity and a love for music apps.

Figma Doc | 7-9 min read | TL;DR for those in a rush | Mar-April 2025 | UI Design

Why Isn't YouTube Music Winning?

YouTube Music has everything it needs to be a major player in the streaming world — a massive content library, Google’s backing, and a unique video integration. So why isn’t it taking off like Spotify or Apple Music? Users often describe YouTube Music as clunky, confusing, and frustrating.

Why is google hiding YouTube Music? — Why is Google hiding YouTube Music?

At the moment, Youtube Music holds under 10% of the streaming market. (source) ↗

Research & Insights: What’s Holding Users Back?

Step 1: Gathering Insights

Since I couldn’t access Google’s internal data, I turned to what mattered most — real user feedback. I analyzed:

Blogs/articles about YouTube Music.
Dozens of Reddit threads where power users shared detailed feedback.
Play Store reviews

To uncover the real issues, I took a methodical approach to research — organizing my findings to identify patterns and prioritize solutions. [references] ↓

I systematically documented each pain point/user complaint in FigJam, theming by comments like “Navigation,” “Playlist Control,” and “Content Discovery.” This rigorous qualitative analysis ensured the insights were grounded in real user voices, not just personal hunches.

Patterns quickly emerged around navigation, personalization, and content access – indicating the UX was the likely problem behind YouTube Music’s struggles, not the music catalog itself.

Step 2: Synthesizing the Findings

After organizing my data, I analyzed the most recurring themes to identify patterns. This step was crucial. It helped me connect the dots and spot relationships between issues.

By linking issues back to broader themes, I identified 4 major pain points:

Content Hidden (Podcasts & More): YouTube Music isn’t just music – it has podcasts, liver-performances and music videos too – but some users barely knew it existed. Users admitted they resorted to the regular YouTube app or other services to find video-versions of songs, a clear sign of navigation failure.

App Is Too Rigid: People wanted more flexibility in organizing their content.
Video/Audio Confusion: Users kept accidentally switching between audio-only and video content.

Samples Feels like YT Shorts: Samples felt disconnected from users' interests and had no filtering, resulting in random content that wasn’t useful.

Samples was missing in the desktop version. In the Mobile version many ignored the Samples feature entirely, which means a whole part of the intended user journey (short-form discovery → finding a new song/artist) was essentially broken.

This highlighted an opportunity to redesign the discovery experience to actually serve user needs (e.g., adding filters, better recommendations, clearer actions to save or play the song in full).

Step 3: Understanding the Competition

While the focus was on YouTube Music’s users, it’s worth noting many commenters spontaneously compared their experience to Spotify or Apple Music. To see how YouTube Music performed against the two, I analyzed Spotify and Apple Music. I explored their UI patterns, discovery tools, and content organization to identify where YouTube Music was falling short:

Spotify excels at discovery, with intuitive recommendations and smart browsing.
Apple Music offers a sleek, polished UI that feels effortless.
YouTube Music’s video library is a major strength, but it wasn’t being leveraged effectively.

Personas: Humanizing the findings

I developed three key personas to guide design decisions. These personas directly informed my design goals, ensuring each solution solved a real user problem.

The Redesign

My redesign deals with just the desktop version — particularly those who listen to music while working, studying, or gaming. These users rely heavily on efficient navigation and seamless control, often juggling multiple tabs or screens.

Dedicated Podcast Tab

To make podcasts easier to find, , the redesign adds "Podcasts" to the navigation. ensuring they’re no longer buried and are as visible as music

This also signals that YT Music is more than just music. (Insight tie-in: Users shouldn’t have to “hunt” for major content; this was a clear win from the research feedback.)

Better Music Discovery

Many users felt YouTube Music was missing the sense of “effortless discovery” that Spotify offers. I realized that discovery wasn’t just about better recommendations — it was also about better browsing.

To improve this, I added a new feature: Shared Sound

For desktop users with less time to browse actively, these changes ensured that discovery felt intuitive and purposeful, not random.

Playbar

A common micro-frustration was the two-step process to view lyrics. I redesigned the Now Playing screen to display lyrics with no effort for ambient listeners. While not a top complaint in forums, it aligns with the theme of ease of use.

Reflection

After Iteration 1, the design felt more logical and a user-friendly experience.

I did a sense-check against the personas:

✅ Alex could manage playlists more easily with clearer navigation and less clutter.

✅ Bella immediately noticed the Podcasts button, addressing her biggest pain.

But some deeper issues remained unaddressed and a few new insights came up upon reflection and feedback from a couple of fellow UX designers I consulted.

What Didn’t Work:

❌ Despite the cleaner visuals, some users still felt the layout was not ideal.

❌ There wasn't really much done for the customization aspect.

❌ The redesigned playbar took up a lot of space and didn’t add much value.

Back to the drawing board

For the second iteration, I refined the design with a sharper focus on user feedback, but this time I took a more experimental approach to solving the problems I’d identified.

Improved Playbar with 'Studio Mode'

I experimented a bit with the playbar, making it subtle again – but in way that it is more cohesive with the rest of the UI. I have also made sure it is a scalable design. The expand button opens up a 'Studio Mode' which is a more immersive experience for the user.

The rationale was to serve both casual and power users: in normal mode, the play bar remains minimalistic for quick control; but in Studio Mode, enthusiasts (like Alex) can geek out on details (perhaps see song credits or add trivia like with Genius) without cluttering the default view.

This wasn’t explicitly asked for by users, but it emerged from thinking about how to exceed expectations while solving the core issues (and it leveraged YouTube’s visual nature, aligning with the overall strategy).

This is a feature that could be a premium feature to add value to the subscription model.

Reimagined “Samples” for Discovery

I added Samples to the desktop version, including a seek bar for precise playback and a "Save to Library" option for quick bookmarking. This improved discovery while giving Carlos a strong reason to engage with the app.

Oh, it also comes with lyrics.

More Layout Control

Desktop users, in particular, often switch between background listening and active browsing. They wanted control over their layout to tailor the experience to their workflow.

Reflecting on the redesign

Through Iteration 2, every design decision was tied back to the research insights:

Alex can now reorganize playlists with less pain and enjoy using the Studio Mode to deeply engage with his music.
Bella finds jumping between a music album and a podcast much more straightforward, and the app finally feels like it supports her use case rather than fighting it.
Carlos discovers a few new songs via the tailored Samples feed and no longer feels lost on the home screen.

References

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