Reading is an essential part of a UX Designer/Researcher and what’s better than reading and learning from Case Studies of popular Big Tech Companies.
The slogan of TikTok is “Records good Life”, But do they really care about your good life?
They were the first to make the short-form content popular and consumable.
Almost all the Video Platforms (and even Spotify) are now taking inspiration from it in some way or the other.
TikTok established itself as Fun and Addictive by customising the users feed with their respective interests. As soon as you sign up you get the option to choose your interests ranging anywhere from entertainment, food, Drama to life hacks and everything in between.
here comes the first trick which TikTok plays: Unless you manually pause the Video, it keeps you engaged and eliminates any downtime and this utilises the full screen of your phone giving you an immersive experience that was missed by YouTube and IG TV.
The MOST important action of TikTok's onboarding is to Just Swipe and no extra effort. The more you swipe, the more likely you are to keep swiping. and Their end goal is to get you to swipe without even thinking about it (habit).
The next thing that blew my mind was that TikTok with requesting your location access gets your location and personalises your content. They use, what’s known as IP Sniffing For the Personalisation of content to match it with people around you.
Now comes the most interesting part: The Content of the videos. A Normal Basic Youtube Video takes roughly around 5-6 Hours to make which includes Scripting, Filming, Editing in the Post and Publishing. TikTok eliminated all these steps.
Last But definitely not the least thing is the Digital well-being of the user and TikTok pushes a video in the feed to subtly remind you to take a pause/break and according to data, TikTok’s current ratio of male and female users is basically the same, with 48.03% male users and 51.97% female users.
But so they really care? No, it’s **False empathy.**
Empathy is the first step towards the User-Centred Design process.
The Empathise mode is the work you do to understand people, within the context of your design challenge. It is your effort to understand the way they do things and why, their physical and emotional needs, how they think about the world, and what is meaningful to them, Faking it would not be considered a good User Experience Practice.
and this is what is shown in the below-linked image:
Image: Growth.Design
According to statistics, the short video released by the ordinary person through the platform accounted for about 49.1% of users to participate in the challenging topics of the platform and In age distribution, users are mainly young people, with the highest proportion under the age of 30 this is more alarming as TikTok has all three content channels namely the User Generated Content (UGC), Professionally generated content (PGC) and Organisational Generated Content (OGC) working for it without much categorisation and targets the user with a smart algorithm working as the content engine and you as a user barely knows what you will see next.
That’s all I hope you found something new and interesting.