UX Case Study: Personalizing TikTok’s For You Page
TikTok has overtaken the internet. No matter your age, identity, or tech-savviness, you’ve probably seen a TikTok in some way, whether it was out of your own will or someone shoving a phone in front of your face. The incredibly popular video platform has garnered views from its ingenious concept of recycling “sounds” in other user’s videos and using them in yours, along with countless vocal and visual effects ready at the hand. Because of this, the app finds itself gaining more and more content to attract users each day.
In order to sort through the sheer amount of videos on the app, TikTok presents them to users in three ways: the Discover page, which allows users to search for various tags or other accounts; the Following page, displaying posts from accounts that a user has followed; and the For You page.
The For You page is the first thing (aside from an advertisement) that a user sees upon opening the app. Its composition is reliant on the company’s algorithm for finding material relevant to the user’s interests and trending topics. Because of the algorithm’s accuracy and the ability to simply scroll from one video to the next, the For You page is a tempting rabbit hole to fall down… but what if it was downright irresistible? In comes my UX team, with a goal to further personalize and improve the For You page without touching Tiktok’s algorithm.
The Research
In order to learn more about the relationship between the For You page and user retention, my project mates, Selene Vitela and Kanijah Brickhouse, and I decided to conduct mainly non-directed interviews.
We started out broad, gleaning bits of information about our interviewee’s everyday lives and their general interactions with the app. Asking questions such as:
What does your daily schedule consist of?
and
How often do you check in on the app?
This already told us a lot about the rapport between users and their For You page. Our users, whether they scroll through the app in a busy line or use it as a way to wind down in bed after a long day, rely on their For You page to get the content they like. They barely switched over to their Following page or bothered searching up a certain tag. It was no surprise then, hearing their responses to the question:
Do you think the TikTok algorithm does a good job?
For the most part, TikTok seems to have nailed their relevancy algorithm. Keyword: most. Sometimes trending videos became annoying, sometimes the theme of our interviewees’ entire feeds essentially reset because of clicking a single video. Instead of tampering TikTok’s secret relevancy algorithm, my team decided to make two additions to the For You page.
The Solution
A simple way to evade a glitchy feed is to sort and filter through it manually. Much like you’d see in other apps, we added the options to sort For You content by relevancy and chronological order (top right button) and to filter through posts based on genre (top left button).
The decision to keep these buttons at the top corners of the screen was to make them somewhat inconvenient to access. Because most people’s thumbs can’t easily reach up to where those buttons are located, they would be less likely to accidentally hit something that would alter the current state of their feed. Predicted to be used sparsely and in the case of a problem, these buttons are located in a place where the user would have to make an effort to reach.
The Chronological/Relevancy Sort Button
Denoted by an icon of a clock, the Chronological/Relevancy Sort button allows the user to toggle the way in which their feed is organized. The inspiration for the button actually came from Twitter, which introduced the option to toggle back and forth after the app’s users demanded that their timelines stay in chronological order. Oddly enough, their button was a sparkle emoji. We decided to go for a more logical icon: a clock.
The Filter Button
Our other option was a bit more ambitious. We decided to allow users to weed out the content that they prefer with our Filter button. We picked this feature mainly to counteract a wonky feed. Our users were neutral towards the notion of blacklisting/whitelisting certain tags on their feeds. They communicated to us that they prefer scrolling through their For You page rather than manually having to search through tags to change its composition. The filters allow them a quick fix when it comes to adjusting their feed, removing the need to type in tags relevant to their tastes.
The conclusion
TikTok has employed an effective design to keep users locked in on their homepage — Everything they need is right there in front of them. For that reason, it was a little difficult proposing tweaks to the design, but my team felt that these additions to the For You page would be both non-intrusive in a user’s typical experience and helpful to those who decide to play around with the features. We had a really fun time delving into the app, interviewing our friends, and applying our skills learned through Radify to create our mockups!