YouTube has become one of the largest online-based companies in the world, hosting videos for the entire world to access and view, and employs hundreds of thousands of people that post content to the site. These people are refereed to as creators.  Within YouTube, creators collaborate with each other to create quality videos, and grow their viewership, or subscription rates/ view rates. New creators are joining everyday, and the requirement for good content increases everyday to attract views and new subscribers. This makes the need for collaboration more prevalent and the need of communication between these creators more demanding. But how do these creators communicate with each other to agree to meet up or even discuss collaborations? And how would a creator know if there was any other creators that would also be interested in collaborating that lived within range of them?

YouTube currently has a messaging system in place that functions as a basis for YouTube creators to connect with each other, and there are other social media sites in which creators can communicate. However, as a YouTube creators channel grows and becomes increasingly popular, the inboxes of these channels become crowded with messages from “ haters, fan girls, spam, etc.” This makes it nearly impossible for serious collaboration inquires to get through to the channel creator they are trying to seek.  This makes the messaging system ineffective for creators to use for collaboration when they hit a certain level of subscribers. 

In research, there was another issue that was discovered/ goes hand in hand with the messaging system is how do creators actually find other creators that they can collaborate with? There are many different styles of YouTube video categories, from Gaming “Let’s Play’s” to makeup tutorials. Many of these styles of videos can be produced solo and obtain a large amounts of success. But to add attraction of new subscribers or increase the viewing potential, collaboration is necessary. This is very important for new creators who do not have large amounts of views/ subscribers. As of the beginning of 2015, there aren’t many options for new creators to be able to find and connect with other creators. In research, only two options were found that stated to validly tell where a video was posted from (using Google Maps), but farther investigation lead to discover that both sites didn’t provide accurate or helpful information with this issue.  

Outcome:
With this solution and keeping the styling of Google/ YouTube’s identity and, the following mock-ups are an idea of what YouTube Together would look like as a mobile application.
Keeping similar to the format the YouTube Creator Studio has in placement of channel banner and display picture, the messaging system replicates most text messaging/ chat formats currently used within mobile devices. Other features such as Settings, Menu and Backspace buttons are also similar to current symbols.  Using YouTube’s designated font style and colors through out the application keep coherency with the purpose of the application.