Tiktok Places
Adding a places feature to encourage users to find food recommendations through Tiktok
ROLE
UX Designer
TEAM
Self
TIMELINE
Mar 2024 - May 2024
OVERVIEW
I often find myself going to cafes and restaurants that I see on Tiktok, even without a dedicated food recommendation feature. If Tiktok were to implement this feature to its app, would that increase user engagement and how would it compare to existing food recommendation apps such as Yelp, Google Maps, or Instagram?
Curious, I researched competing apps, surveyed existing Tiktok users, and prototyped the new feature to see how users would react. Tiktok Places is the newest way to get food recommendations on Tiktok.
00 | SCREENS
Screens Overview
01 | BACKGROUND
Food recommendation might not be Tiktok’s intended use - but it’s a byproduct of the app
02 | USER SURVEY
Users care most about good reviews, yummy visuals, and rating
To learn more about what users cared about in a food recommendation app, I surveyed 50 people asking about what they expect in a food recommendation app and what they thought about Tiktok including a food recommendation feature.
32%
said they cared most about genuine reviews from people
26%
cared most about appealing pictures
18%
cared most about the overall star rating
People who already use Tiktok to find food recommendations mentioned the importance of seeing “videos of the actual location and food” to “give more of a feel of the atmosphere”.
03 | COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Tiktok has the visuals and genuine individual reviews but lacks an overall user rating and an organized way of searching for a recommendation
To do some more research, I took a look at what Tiktok already had and what competing apps had to offer.
Easy to use if the food place has an Instagram and posts a lot of content
Algorithm recommends reels and posts of food places
Harder to search for a recommendation
Doesn’t allow user to filter search
Photos on map of each location
Really helpful information for each food place
Menu + Reviews + Photos + Hours + Location
Easy to leave a review
Reviews include lots of good photos
Easiest app to search for a place
Has “tags” that are really helpful:
e.g bakery, international grocery, coffee & tea
Helpful for getting a general idea of popular places
Not helpful for looking at reviews of a specific place
Not a good app for recommendations unless you join a niche community
04 | USER FLOW
Outlining Tiktok Place’s User Flows
I created a user flow diagram to organize how I envisioned the new places feature with a designated page for food recommendations, a search page, and an individual restaurant page where you could see reviews.
After this, I created lo-fi screens for how I imagined the pages to look like. I modeled these after Tiktok’s existing pages.
04 | USER INTERVIEWS
Should restaurants create their own pages or should users be allowed to add any restaurant that they want?
While creating my lo-fi screens, I came across a problem with the restaurant page. Yelp has it so that restaurants must create their own listing before users are allowed to add reviews. However, the way that Tiktok has it now allows users to create any content about any restaurant without it having to have an existing page.
Having an official page gives restaurants more control and makes reviews more official, however it takes away freedom from users to post their own content about it. On the other hand, not having an official page might make it harder for users to find reliable reviews of a restaurant.
I decided to interview existing Tiktok users and ask them what they would prefer.
4 out of 5 users
agreed that allowing Tiktok users more freedom to post reviews and content of what they want was more important
One user stated that, “I think that the reason why people like using Tiktok is because it’s so easy to create and find content about anything, so getting rid of that freedom might go against what user’s are used to.”
05 | HI-FI SCREENS
Creating Hi-Fi Screens following Tiktok's Design
After modeling my lo-fi screens and getting an idea of how the app was structured, I created hi-fi screens and a components library to match the Tiktok design guidelines.
06 | PROTOTYPE