TikTok - Feature Redesign
UX case study
MY ROLE
The objective of this case study was to gain a deep understanding of the user experience issues with TikTok mobile app and to resolve them by creating more accessible and user-friendly interfaces.
Timeline: 2 weeks.
Methods: User research, Wireframes, Prototyping, Visual design.
Tools: Figma, Google Form.
Project Overview
TikTok is a social networking site where users may create and watch short-form videos. The app is especially popular among young people, who use it to follow users, share, likes, edit and post videos and interact with other users.
TikTok has been making efforts to enhance its features and usability, in order to remain competitive as a platform that caters to its creators. Keeping this in mind, the objective of this research is to come up with innovative ideas to improve the user experience.
Problem Statement
TikTok users struggle to find the favorite feature and organize saved videos into it. The Favorite function is not the app's primary objective. However, due to a lot of contents, users prefer to save videos or content they like for future access. So, we can identify the organisation tools are not user-friendly, and it doesn't have a search field for quick research. These things end up frustrating the user.
The proposed solution was to create a flow that allows users to:
Find the favorite features.
Easily add, delete and move items in favourites.
Quickly search for items in favorites.
My Design process
To guide myself in this project I used the design process methodology:
Discover
User Research
To understand the user's needs, I began researching the app's statistics and business goals,
TikTok was the most downloaded app of 2021, with 656 million downloads.
57% of TikTok users are female, and 43% are male.
Roughly 43% of TikTok's global audience is between 18 and 24 years old.
90% of TikTok users visit the app more than once per day.
They spend an average of 52 minutes per day on the platform.
TikTok has great engagement among the Gen Z audience. TikTok has an easy-to-use video editor and filters that allow users to quickly create and recreate videos. The users can also enjoy trends and challenges that encourage interaction with other users.
After gathering the Tiktok user's profile through statistical data, I searched for app reviews and interviewed four active TikTok users. To identify possible pain points they may have.
“If there were some way to search/find a video within your ‘favorite’. It’s super annoying trying to show a video to a friend and being unable to find it because you have to scroll endlessly through saved videos”
“… there’s no way to organize the videos you like and favorite. Also … use SEARCH. SEARCH for things you are looking for or like.”
“The app should have an option to select more than one video and save them all in sometime on the fav. It’s hard to organize the favorite when you have to go through several screens to do it.”
Results
52,9% spend more than 1 hour on the app.
88,2% percent of users have already given up looking for content either in their favorites or likes.
Users declare that they have difficulties organizing the contents.
Most users save the videos using the like button or share the videos on social media apps.
Some users said they did not know the favorites option existed. They used to use "like" to save the videos.
Key Insights
Users were unaware of the favorite function. These users mistook the "like" as a favorite feature.
Users struggle to find and organize their saved videos into favorites.
The favorite flow should be improved.
Define
Persona
After analyzing the data from TikTok statistics and interview results, I tried to understand the user's motivations when using TikTok by creating a proto-persona.
User Testing
To better understand the user journey on TikTok, I applied a small test with one of the users. The user should complete three simple tasks. The goal was to find which points in the favorite flow had problems. What was the user's behavior when faced with this challenge, and how did the user solve it?
User task:
Add a video to favorites.
Create a collection.
Delete video from Collection.
Problems found
The user was unaware of the gesture to press and hold the screen to open the share menu.
The user found it challenging to identify the favorite link on the profile screen.
The manage videos button is not clear and has the function of editing the content of the collection.
A quote from a user about the delete function:
I pressed the three dots because it is usually there that the edit option appears on Instagram. I thought it was the same here.”
Ideation
Competitive Analysis
While the research findings allowed me to narrow down the problem, I needed some inspiration before I started wireframing. I took a look at some of competitors like Youtube and Instagram favorite feature to understand how users can engage save content from this app, and who those solutions could be relevant.
Wireframes
After examining this different user flows, I brainstormed possible solutions and I created a basic wireframe flow for the main features for TikTok users to meet their goals most effectively.
Add Favorites
Currently, to add a video to favorites, the user presses the screen and chooses the option to save to favorites. It automatically saves to "All Favorites”. I added a step further. The user can choose to immediately create a new collection and save the video in it, or save it to an existing collection. If the user doesn't choose none of the options, "All Favorites" is already selected.
Search field
TikTok does not have a search bar inside the bookmarks, only in the main menu. As I found this demand during the research, I added the search field inside the main page of favorites and in each collection. The search can be done either from "All Favorites" or within each collection.
Edit favorites
I added the search field inside the collection. In TikTok, the "manage video" button presents the options to move, remove, and add a video to a collection. At three dots user can rename and delete the collection. Thinking about usability and reducing user steps I concentrated all actions in one place.
Prototype
Followed the official TikTok design pattern. The study aimed to improve user usability.
The link to high fidelity is below.
Takeaway
Insight
This two-week project was challenging because of the short time to do it. But at the same time, I was able to start redesigning a current product that I use every day and deal with a problem I faced as an active user. This project allowed me to use the research knowledge I've studied and observe how a "favorite" or "save" system is incorporated into different applications.
Next Step
Because of the short time, it's not been possible to do the test with users and evaluate the changes I've implemented so far. So the next steps will be:
Test functionality with users to gather feedback.
Evaluate the results and propose improvements based on the feedback acquired.
Thinking about customizing some functions, such as:
Methods for users to sort and reorder collections according to their preferences
ability to share and link to these collections with friends.