*This project is a personal case study. There were no affiliations with the company Tiktok.*
Background
TikTok is a social media platform for creating and watching short-form videos, from genres ranging from dance, skits, and lip-syncing to education, social awareness, and games.
TikTok has been updating many features, including new filters and stickers, several times a month to remain competitive as a unique, creator-inclusive platform.
The Goal
“Create a better user flow that allows users to easily organize individual items into folders & quickly search items within favorites.”
TikTok users are currently struggling to quickly locate and organize their favorites (saved videos), leading them to spend an excessive amount of time scrolling or ultimately giving up.
In this case study, I designed 3 feature components to help TikTok users with the problem above.
Save to Collection
Created a Collections Feature where users and save their favorite videos into their own unique folders.
Search Within a Collection
Added a local Search Feature within the Collections, allowing users to filter through their engaged content.
Onboarding the collection Feature
Incorporating an onboarding card at the launch of the app introducing the new collections feature.
Empathize
Understanding the Problem
To understand the users’ needs, I began by researching the app’s statistics:
- As of June 2020, the most popular content categories on TikTok all have over one billion views
- 800 Million Active Users Worldwide
- TikTok users spend nearly 500 minutes per month on the app
Competitive Analysis
I compared 3 items that shared similar functionalities. For these products, users can save content into collections. For iOS Camera, users can add content in to albums, and favoriting a picture adds the content into a “Favorites” album.
User Interviews
To get a better insight on the users pain points. I was able to conduct research interviews with 10 individuals who are active users of TikTok.
My assumption is that majority of the users will feel friction while searching through their favorites page due to the amount of content they engage with.
Participant Information
Number of Participants: 10
Age Range: 19 – 47 yrs.
Line of Work: Engineering, Business IT, Technology, Healthcare, Product Development, Student
What I was able to discover was that even though most users use TikTok as a form of entertainment, there are also users who would like to be able to recall previously viewed and saved content so that they can share and rewatch these videos. There is so much content volume, and most videos don’t even use hashtags related to the post. Content creators only add tags to boost the viewership and engagements. So for a consumer of the videos, it has become challenging to sort through them.
Key Insights
- Most TikTok users use the platform multiple times a day.
- All 10 participants marked the reason “to rewatch” as a reason to favorite content.
- 10/10 participants said “yes” to having given up while searching for content.
- 8/10 participants said “maybe” or “no” to spending more than 15 seconds searching for content.
- 9/10 participants said that they share content in that moment, by sending it to others.
- 10/10 participants said searching by username, caption or hashtags would be beneficial.
User Comments
- “All I did to engage with a video was click the heart button, I wasn’t aware of this feature for TikTok.”
- “It would definitely be more convenient to be able to save things to be able to find it later. However, I see how it can get a bit overwhelming if I have a lot of videos saved.”
- “I used to just share the video to myself via text message if I thought the video was important to refer back to later”
Define
Identifying the Users
Here’s an example of the Persona Card and Empathy Map that I created. This exercise allows me to visually capture and document the persona story for myself and communicate this same narrative to others.
Persona
In order to stay problem-oriented, I created a persona named Olivia Green, a college student who has a passion for creating video content for her fans.
When she is not a creator, she is casually browsing through her feed to find ideas for her next piece of content. She saves over 50 videos a day, and after a week of saving video ideas, she finds it almost impossible to find the specific content she wants later.
Emapthy Map
This map allowed me to understand both the persona’s needs, as well as wants, by laying out how they feel, think, say, and do based on my initial research. It allowed me to create the problem statements below.
Problem Statements
- How might we help users find content so that they do not give up while searching?
- How might we eliminate time consuming scrolling to find content they previously engaged with?
- How might we help users add personal identifiers to content they engage with?
Value Proposition
Ideate
Information Architecture
I started off by analyzing the current structure of the application and seeing how users are adding to favorites. TikTok has a “Favorites” feature, but most users are not aware of it. Typically, we are looking at the “Liked” and “Hearted” content.
Brainstorming New Terminology, Features, & Proposed Task Flow
Once I defined the user and understood the current structure of the application, I started to think of features that could solve some of the “How Might We” questions from above.
In the proposed state, most of the flow is the same. However, there will be an added capability to save to a collection where one of the default collections folders will be labeled as “Favorites”. The user can also create a new collection without having to leave the “For You” page/home feed.
Early Sketchs
I created early sketches of the user flow showcasing the 3 features being added. I added Collection, Search Collection, and Onboarding.
Design
Mid-High Fidelity User Flow Designs
I used my sketches and created a higher fidelity mockup of each step in the user flow for all 3 features.
Testing
Prototype Testing
Usability Testing
With the prototypes above, I conducted 4 task-based usability tests. For each prototype, I simply instructed the user to do the following tasks:
- Add a video from the “For You” page to a collection.
- Search on their profile for collections and a specific video.
User Feedback
From the user test conducted with the prototype, I was able to identify a couple of pain points that the participants came across. Overall, for all the features discussed in this case study, the impact was incredible. The prototype received a lot of praise from the test participants.
- “Wow this actually looks and feels like TikTok.”
- “Man! I wish this was actually a real thing the TikTok allowed users to do.
- “I honestly didn’t even know that TikTok had a favorites feature, but with this proposed “collections” feature, I think a lot of users could benefit from this product.”
Wrap up
Key takeaways
Insights
After brainstorming the features above, I came to realize that the “Favorites” feature is not heavily used by TikTok users today. However, based on my research, I believe that if a “Collections” feature were to be launched by the platform then more users would actually utilize the feature, especially, if they were to implement a similar onboarding popup as I suggested above.
Reason Why I Chose Mock it!
Before creating a successful product, you have to identify or recognize the problem. I myself am a TikTok user and for me the videos I see are both fun and educational. However, whenever I came across a video that I believed would be important enough to rewatch and learn from, whether it was about product design, food recipes or places to visit, I shared the video to myself by texting the link to myself. I later found out that a lot of my peers were doing the same thing. That is how I fell in love with this project.
Next Steps
Edit Collections, Share Collections & Shared Collections
I believe there are always ways to improve current features to the evolving users of TikTok. So as my next step, I would focus on ways for users to customize this feature by including:
- Ways for users to sort and reorder collections to their preference.
- Ability to share and link to these collections with friends.
- Ability to have a collaborative collection between friends.
A Feature Used by Other Platforms.
At the beginning of this case study, I conducted a competitive analysis on various social platforms. Collections are already being used by a few platforms, however, they still don’t allow the user to search or filter through the content that they once engaged with. I believe there is a great opportunity to increase the overall user experience for all major social media platforms.
If you have any questions regarding this project please feel free to reach out to me using the mediums below.