TikTok Usability for People over 34
Context & Background
TikTok overtook Google as the most visited website of 2021. Moreover, according to research conducted by Google, for around 40% of young people aged 18-24, TikTok is the preferred search tool used when they search for somewhere to eat. Additionally, young people who want a more authentic experience utilize TikTok over Youtube to find recipes, travel recommendations, and how-to videos (New York Times, 2022). The Guardian (2022) even found that TikTok is the fastest-growing news source for people aged 16-24 in the U.K.
However, despite TikTok’s emergence, 72.7% of the app’s users are 34 years or younger, and 41.7% are 24 or younger (Statista, 2022), which excludes a vast swath of the general population, suggesting that if TikTok wants to gain market share in the search engine and video streaming fields, it will need to be usable to populations aged 35 and up.
Because of TikTok’s rising ubiquity, we wanted to understand how usable TikTok is for users beyond its primary demographic, mainly, people ages 35 and up to get a sense of whether or not TikTok can entirely supplant Google as the world’s most prominent search engine.
What we ended up finding was that TikTok’s interface is indeed usable for many age segments. However, the pain points we discovered were in how useful our research participants found TikTok.
Reflections & Recommendations
Our Recommendations include the following:
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TikTok can design clear pathways to control autoplay and encourage more extended navigation of the app and consumption of subsequent videos
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Create options for extended play
Although TikTok extended the maximum length of videos to three minutes, this is not enough time to create content that is thorough and substantive for this demographic, which our participants stated they hoped to find in our study’s KPIs. In addition to entertaining videos, this allows instructive and informational videos.
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Create Robust Algorithms, allowing users to find what they want.
Similar to the algorithms of Youtube or Instagram, TikTok can facilitate an environment conducive to user-created genres and subgenres.
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Allow Integration with other apps.
Tools used by this demographic are Youtube, Google, and Wikipedia, so maybe clean integration of this would be beneficial.
Timeline
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Three weeks for initial interviews and to collect data
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Two weeks for analysis
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Two weeks to write the report
Research Goals
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To see effectively atypical Tik-Tok age populations complete basic search tasks on TikTok
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To glean how useful atypical Tik-Tok age populations find TikTok’s search function
Methodology
● Talk-Aloud Protocol: We had our remote participants share their screens so we could watch their processes. As they navigated TikTok’s interface, we had our users speak aloud through the KPI and to verbalize what they were doing, how they felt, and what they thought of what they were seeing on TikTok’s UI.
Talk-Aloud KPI
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Search for a video you’d typically search for using other search tools
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Search for a gluten-free cookie recipe
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Leave a comment on the video you found and viewed
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Search for a vacation spot with ample hiking
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Save the video to watch later
● User Interviews: Before and after our talk-aloud, we spoke to users about what they knew about TikTok, what tools they typically use for searching, their usual purposes for searching, etc.
● SUS Test to quantify users' thoughts on TikTok’s ease of use and whether or not they felt they’d continue to use TikTok, we used a SUS test.
Recruitment
An executive summary was created with an expansive overview of insights and related recommendations about making TikTok a more useful and appealing application for users outside of TikTok’s demographic.
Impact
While our research was done on behalf of TikTok only hypothetically, we believe our insights can help TikTok’s emerging prominence in gaining more search engine market share across demographics.
TikTok’s platform allows accessible and enjoyable content; if it provides sufficiently informative content, it can compete with Google, Youtube, and other ubiquitous searching tools.