5 - Kristi Starling

For project 3, my partner and I made a very simple change to YouTube, with the goal being an obvious design without bells and whistles.  Any design, however, always has room for improvement.  I chose to use the Unnecessary Test to evaluate what features would be best removed from our design.

The Unnecessary Test involves asking three questions regarding each feature of the design:  Is there more than one way to complete the task this feature supports?  Does this feature contribute directly to the completion of the task? Is the task this feature supports vital to the activity this application supports?  A "no" to any of these questions means a feature could be unnecessary.

Here's a look at our design:

The idea is that the user can save videos to "My Videos" then go to the page shown above to view them and organize them into playlists.  Three different tabs appear at the top to view all videos, view recently added videos, and view and manage playlists.  In light of the Unnecessary Test, however, I realized that perhaps the "Recently Added" tab is a feature we don't really need.  The idea was that videos would appear in the "All Videos" tab in reverse order that they were added (i.e. with the most recently added appearing first), so there is no real reason to also have a "Recently Added" tab.  Accessing recently added videos can be accomplished just as easily through the "All Videos" tab, and thus the "Recently Added" tab fails the first question of the Unnecessary Test.