TikTok, the next up and coming social media app, allows users to create, post and share 15 second videos. These videos are soundtracked by music/audio clips to make it more entertaining and attractive. Many users leverage on this platform to showcase interesting finds such as restaurants and cafes.
We were a team of 5 students with no design thinking or UX background. It was our first time learning and exploring about user experience. Hence, we split the tasks equally in order for all of us to get exposed to all areas and learn together.
We focused on user research and development for this project.
We conducted document review and user reviews to better understand the situation that the users were in. This included exploring the app as a user and conducted informal discussions with 30 friends who are frequent TikTok users. Subsequently, we looked through other users' comments on the app itself and inferred potential needs
Desk Research Summary
While many users leverage TikTok to share restaurants and cafes, the audience would want to find out more about the mentioned place, such as the food available, location and prices. However, there are no direct website links to these recommended places.
This results in the interested users having to do their own research. To do so, users will have to leave the app to do a search on the browser. However, not many users do it as they find the process long and tiring. This will also break their scrolling flow and refresh their page. They then tend to forgo this step and continue using TikTok instead. Later on, they realize that they have forgotten the name of the restaurant. They have forgotten the user's account, and is unable view the video again.