My Strange Addiction: TikTok. What’s the treatment?

As an avid TikTok user myself, I set out to find out how I could improve the app. Never did I think that my improvement would have something to do with people spending less time on it. Interestingly enough, there is such a thing as too addicting, even from a company standpoint.

Addiction or not, TikTok is an amazing place to learn just about anything. It is one of the single best platforms to find content catered specifically to you, which provides an endless source of entertainment. That endless aspect in fact tends to be a blessing and a curse. You may have heard it before but you intend to spend a couple minutes on TikTok and realize after leaving the app you’ve spent 2 hours. In a world where all the information we desire is at our fingertips, TikTok goes a step further to provide us the information we never knew we needed. This can be dangerous when the time you spend on TikTok cuts into the time you spend on your work, with family and friends, or even time with yourself. Many people spoke of reclaiming their time by deleting the app and this is not the resolution that the company desires.

My original plan was to explore the lack of captioning in Tiktok but that was too narrow of a problem, and not one that I found many users frustrated by.

From my early user research, I had noticed a pattern of disdain for how much time users spent on TikTok. It was almost as if they were embarrassed to be spending so much time on the app, to the point that many would delete it. I decided that this would be the scope of my people problem. From this I found the people problem to be:

When I am watching videos I want to be in control of how long I am on the app for. I want to be able to leave the app when I am ready. I can’t do that well because:

1. Tiktok is addictive and there is no incentive to stop watching videos
2. There is no sense of time on the app, so it’s continuous scrolling of content catered to you
3. Tiktok makes it hard to leave the app and even delete the app

User Research

• I interviewed users with questions about some of their favorite and least favorite things about the app. Here are some of the insights I found:

1. Users spend more time on the app than they’re comfortable with

Every person that I interviewed spoke about TikTok like an addiction, and like all addictions it’s a hard habit to break.

2. Users who do not create find it easier to delete the app

Many Users spoke of not being able to delete TikTok because they had videos in their drafts. Because TikTok is a creating platform, many users have created videos they may someday post.

3. Users use TikTok as a form of escape from boredom

Many people join TikTok when they are bored. Users spoke of initially downloading the app to pass time but now spend too much time on the app.

People Want to Have Control Over How Much Time They Spend

Many users spoke highly of how personalized their For You page was, and how much they learned from TikTok. Along with their enjoymnet, they also expressed frustration with feeling trapped in the app, and later wishing they could delete the app.

Brainstorm Session

After identifying my problem space, I decided to brainstorm solutions with two of my friends, Aaron Chan, and Dasmattie Brijmohan.

• After several revisions of solutions we identified the most probable solution areas to be in App tweaks, Pay 2 Play/Tiktok Premium Feature, and Reward System
• From these General Solution spaces we were able to further break it down into 3 possible solutions:

1. TikTok Premium

This idea involved a daily Tiktok limit that creates a paywall after spending too much time on TikTok

2. TikTok Reward Regulation System

This involved rewarding users for time spent off TikTok. This keeps users coming back to TikTok, but also manage their time while on it.

3. TikTok Forced Ads

This involved making the ads on the TikTok For You Page unscrollable. Currently users can scroll past any ad onto the next video.

TikTok Premium was ruled out for fear of scaring away users with a payment barrier, especially for a social media site.

TikTok Reward Regulation was dismissed as well because of the requirement for TikTok to provide a consistent incentive that may hurt their business model.

TikTok Forced Ads was the most feasible of the three and would only require minor app tweaks to be implemented so I decided to move further with this one

The goal of TikTok Forced Ads is to break up the monotony of mindless scrolling that “traps” users into spending too much time on TikTok. After brainstorming ways to influence users to leave the app, two User Flows Stood out most:

Explaining the Unscrollable Ad:

• When user clicks on the skip add button, a pop up window explains the new update and informs the user that ads will become incrementally longer the more time a user spends on TikTok
• Although this method informs the user of time regulation, user may find comfort in knowing that the TikTok app is not glitching.
• Some Pros of this approach:

Explains problem to user, gives background to why feature is being added

• Some cons

Design is visible, user will know immediately that something has changed

Immediate redirection to Ad website:

• This feature will quickly bring users off of TikTok which will make it more likely for them to leave the app altogether
• By clicking “Learn more” users are brought immediately to the ad’s website. Users may browse the website for a while, and then are likely to return to the home screen instead of TikTok
• Some pros of this approach

forces user off app, quick process, unconscious, invisible design

• Some cons of this approach

User may spend too much time off TikTok, user may not like immediate app switch

After examining the flows i decided that both could exist to display flows when clicking different icons on the screen; clicking Skip Ad, and clicking Learn More

Building the Final Feature Into the App

After figuring out my flows I had to examine closely the features of TikTok and figure out how my feature would fit in seamlessly. I wanted the skip ad button to resemble the sky blue color scheme of TikTok and played around with different combinations.

I decided that the white would show better in contrast to other TikTok videos so I decided on the second design.

Similarly, for the Learn more and Why can’t I scroll buttons I looked at color combinations, but found that the Learn more buttons were acceptable as bright colors because they are situated at the bottom of the screen with a black backdrop. I decided to keep the Why can’t I scroll icon simple as black and white so to make it easy to read.

Prototype and User Flows

I decided to create a prototype including the two most likely flows for a users interacting with this feature. These are the final User Flows:

Conclusion and Reflection

Tiktok has been an amazing place for people to learn new things, meet new people, and learn more about themself. It has been a defining source of entertainment for most people in the stressful year that was 2020. As things start to return to a new normal, people are attempting wane off the TikTok dependency they may have acquired during quarantine. Little tricks like unscrollable ads and redirections will help users make more concious decisions about how much time they spend on TikTok. It’s time to give users their time back so that TikTok can still be a source of entertainment without being demonized as a source of addiction.

There may be some logistics of this apporach that TikTok may need to evaluate, but one thing for sure is, too much of a good thing is never a good thing. TikTok should stay on the lookout for how many people are growing a negative association with Tiktok, and monitor how much the app is getting deleted. This is the first step in helping users strike that balance between enjoyment and control.

Self Reflection

This case study was my first introduction to the world of Information Science and Product Design. It was difficult to learn the ropes during a pandemic, but I manged to get by and am proud of the work I did. There’s so much that goes into design that I never realized and I’m so grateful for the designers out there making my experience on these apps as seamless as possible. I really enjoyed completing this project and hope to have future opportunities to explore my interest in design.

*This case study was a project for Introduction to Digital Product Design at Cornell univeristy. I am in no way affiliated with Tiktok.*