Title: Why is Tik Tok sweeping over the world? — an app critique | by Shuhan Yu | UX Collective
Headings: Why is Tik Tok sweeping over the world? — an app critique
Why is Tik Tok sweeping over the world? — an app critique
Many talked about how different TikTok is compared to other apps such as Instagram and Twitter, here we’ll discuss what has made Tik Tok special from the beginning.
The history of Tik Tok
The technological strength of Tik Tok
In a nutshell, Tik Tok has a good UX/UI design to not only attract new users, but also keep existing users.
The marketing approaches of TikTok
Karma’s a bitch is one of the challenges that become viral.
Why though?
The downside of Tik Tok
Conclusion

Content: Users from Douyin, the Chinese version of Tik Tok used in China, spend about 30 minutes daily with opening the app four or five times per day. This data is only slightly behind the Facebook (58 minutes per day with the American Android app in June 2018) and Instagram (53 minutes per day in June 2018). This represents the high user engagement of Tik Tok, and also the addiction to it. Fortunately, Tik Tok provided “Digital Wellbeing” feature inside of Privacy and Settings, similar as the feature of “Manage Your Time” in Facebook and Instagram. This may reveal effort that UX team has put in Tik Tok, fighting against the revenue goal. However, including time management feature in settings may not outshine the allure of the uninterrupted repeating 15 seconds videos and the mysterious intermittent variable rewards. That shows the dark pattern of forced continuity. For first time users, it’s easy to stay in the loop of watching more and more videos instead of finding out the way to “manage your time” in the app. In addition, the feature of syncing user contacts to Tik Tok might meet another type of dark pattern— Friend Spam. According to the paper of The Dark (Patterns) Side of UX Design friend, spam occurs when the product asks for your email or social media permissions under the pretense it will be used for a desirable outcome (e.g. finding friends), but then spams all your contacts in a message that claims to be from you.