Supervised Experiences on Youtube
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Supervised Experiences on Youtube 💝
What I launched
I led the end-to-end product design for all features for Supervised Experiences on YouTube, enabling tweens to use YouTube Main through parent supervised accounts for the first time.
The work rethought nearly every major YouTube feature for younger users, combining age-appropriate content, parental supervision, principled approach to accessing features, and a new onboarding model into one cohesive experience.
The opportunity
YouTube Kids offered a dedicated experience for younger children, but as kids approached their teenage years, many wanted something closer to the full YouTube experience.
At the same time, YouTube needed to evolve its products to meet growing regulatory expectations around how younger users could safely access the platform.
The opportunity was to solve both problems together: could YouTube Main become safe, age-appropriate, and compliant for younger users.
Rather than creating another standalone experience, we explored how the core YouTube platform itself could adapt to support supervised users.
Why it was challenging
Safety and compliance had to be designed into the platform
The experience needed to help YouTube meet youth regulatory requirements while still feeling like YouTube. That meant translating complex safety, privacy, and policy constraints into coherent product principles and experiences.
There was no single “kids version” of YouTube Main. We helped define multiple content experiences from the enormous YouTube corpus, balancing age-appropriateness, growing independence, parental expectations, and regulatory requirements.
Parents needed control
We partnered with industry child development and youth safety experts to help define age appropriate content experiences and safeguards. We had to determine where parental controls were essential, and how supervision could remain understandable as the experience grew more capable.
A principled decision for every feature
Nearly every YouTube feature had to be reconsidered for supervised users. We developed a framework for determining what younger users could access while providing robust parental oversight, and what should remain unavailable entirely.
A closer look at creation
Applying the framework, we redefined what creation meant - allowing for creation but content intentionally limited to a private experience between the user and their parent. This preserved the agency and joy of creating on YouTube while removing the risks associated with public distribution.
Impact
Supervised Experiences enabled younger users to access YouTube Main through a parent supervised, age appropriate experience while helping YouTube meet evolving youth safety and regulatory requirements.
The work established a reusable framework for how YouTube evaluates content, feature access, parental controls, privacy, and safety for younger users across the platform.
It also became a foundational step to bring more age appropriate experiences onto the main YouTube platform