TikTok’s “For You Page” can be further personalized
In 2020, TikTok is one of the most popular social media apps that is not so social. Beyond comments and likes, people don’t use it to interact but rather express themselves. You don’t need a huge following to go viral. Users are given a minute to express themselves via video and publish it for the world to see. Because of the vast amount of users, there it is almost guaranteed that you can find content you like, and TikTok’s algorithm does a good job on showing these videos on its “For You Page”(FYP) based on your viewing history and content you interact with.
Many users mindlessly scroll the app out of boredom and leave it up to the app to show them different categories of videos they may like, but some users want to chose what they want to see and filter out what they don’t without using the block feature. Another change a few users we interviewed wanted to see was control of the order they see videos.
The Process
My team conducted user interviews in order to gauge whether users would even value filters on their FYP. We asked questions like
- “Why do you use TikTok?”
- “What type of content do you like to see?”
- “How do you feel about the layout (of TikTok)?
- “Is there a feature you would like to add or change?”
Respectively, common answers were
- For entertainment from boredom
- Funny videos, dances, makeup, art, hair, morning routines, dancing, etc…
- It is easy to use.
- Sharing videos on your timeline, a page dedicated to viewing “duet”. videos, and allowing their feed to be in chronological order (I seriously second this!).
Our question was “how do we this filter feature to the homepage without making it look less attractive?” since users seemed to like and understand the current one.TikTok has a very simple layout that keeps the focus on the video in the center of the screen.
In our design process, we wanted to be consistent with the color themes in TikTok. We decided to design with dark mode in mind, but to switch to light mode is a simple switch with the simple TikTok color scheme (white, black, red).
We wanted to use icons that typical app users used and recognized. Twitter has a similar feature to the chronological order feature we included, and we all agree that they used the worst icon ever to signify a feature.
Next we decided how we wanted the options to appear on the screen. At first we had the overlay take up almost the entire screen but realized we didn’t want a large amount of content. We didn’t want to create another settings screen. Next we brainstormed the layout of the filter options.
We wanted a quick way to add and remove filter options so we used the highlight toggle option that signifies selection when it is highlighted. The page is named “Select Filters” as a simple instruction. We removed the “Add more” before the discover page or search can help users find more specific filters. “Delete” was redundant to the highlight feature. The categories we selected were more general types of content than #trends that tend to lose popularity.
For the chronological filter option, the pop up screen was named “Sort By” because this function was more of a sort than a filter. There was only two practical options we thought of: most relevant, chronological. We thought about having the icon glow to signify that the feed was chronological, but we didn’t think it would be memorable for users, so we used the same layout as the other page for consistency.
Conclusion
The potential to provide even more personalization of the already personalized FYP can give users a more pleasurable experience. Adding filters and a sort by can create an easier way to use the app with purpose. Users can both find new content on the FYP while specifically filtering their favorite content. This option can benefit users while contributing to TikTok’s algorithm. Sorting the feed chronologically makes staying up to date with your favorite accounts much easier. TikTok remains simple but more personalized, perfecting the content for you and only you.
