Tik Tok product analysis report!

Tik Tok ’s functions are becoming more and more diverse, but there are still some details that need to be optimized. The author analyzes Douyin from the aspects of product positioning, users, functions, and operational ideas, and combines it with Kuaishou and other types of products for analysis. He also provides some suggestions and makes certain speculations on its future development.

1. Product Introduction

1. Product positioning

Judging from the product download page, Douyin highlights the following key points: recording a beautiful life ( short videos ), sharing daily life with friends ( social ), cool props effects ( shooting ), real-time hot spots ( information ), and rich content all available for search ( platformization ).

Tik Tok’s slogan is to record the beautiful life . Combined with the above promotional highlights, Douyin embodies the positioning of short video social software. In addition, Tik Tok conveys a trend of becoming increasingly closely connected with life .

2. Product logo

Figure 1 Logo

The musical notes and the pure black background look very cool, and convey a trendy and unique feeling overall.

3. User positioning

Figure 2: Regional distribution of Douyin user portraits in the past month (data from Baidu Index)

Figure 3 Age ratio of users (data from iResearch)

Through these data, we found that the main user group of Douyin is still the younger generation in first- and second-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu, and users under the age of 35 account for about 80% of the total users .

The characteristics of this group of people are:

• The pace of life is fast and the pressure of life is high.
• Pursue independent personality and desire a sense of recognition.
• Easy to accept new things.
• Likes to follow Internet hot topics, and has the desire to communicate, complain, and play memes online (Weibo, Hupu, Tieba, Bilibili, etc.).
• They have a high level of cognition, are good at using digital tools, and have certain creative and operational capabilities (I personally think that the more knowledgeable and broad-minded they are, the corresponding operational capabilities should also be better.).
• They have strong spending power, especially those users between 25 and 35 years old. The consumption concept of people under 25 years old may be more radical, which is manifested in following trendy brands and pursuing celebrity effects (based on personal cognition, saving lives, etc.).
• …

This group of users constitutes the majority of the main force of online products, which provides certain inherent advantages for Douyin to further develop in other directions .

4. User Classification

According to different usage purposes, we can roughly divide users into the following categories:

• Viewing users: The main purpose of this type of users is to kill time. The corresponding needs mainly include browsing videos, commenting, eating melons, watching live broadcasts, etc.
• Sharing users: Compared with viewing users, these users may post their own short video updates or occasionally broadcast live to record and share their lives. The needs of this type of users are simple and quick shooting methods, publishing processes, live broadcast methods, etc.
• Creative users: Compared with sharing users, this type of users pays more attention to the quality of published works and feedback. Most of their demands are linked to expected income, and they hope to get more traffic support, more push opportunities, more ways to communicate with users, etc.
• E-commerce users: Compared with creative users, this type of users focuses on the sales volume of goods. In addition to traffic and push opportunities, e-commerce users need simple selling methods, secure transaction processes, etc.
• Platform users: Most of these users are official accounts of other software, public media accounts, etc. Most of them are for establishing brand image, issuing official announcements and so on. Their needs are traffic support, unique certification, and so on.
• Advertising users: Most of these users are merchants who hope to place advertisements on Douyin, and their demand is more conversion rates.

2. Functional Analysis

1. Overall functional structure diagram

Figure 4 Functional structure diagram

2. Main function analysis

(1) Home page

① Home page gesture operation

Figure 5 Home page operation process

The recommended page on the homepage is the starting page after successfully entering the app. Swipe right to enter the follow page, swipe right again to enter the local page, and swipe left to return to the previous page. Swipe left on the recommendation page to enter the homepage of the current video account, and swipe right to return.

Swipe up to view the next video, and swipe down to view the previous video. In addition, the page supports single-click to pause and double-click to like. There is a certain delay when clicking to pause, probably to distinguish between single-click and double-click operations.

In general, it is very convenient to operate with one hand, allowing users to continuously obtain new video content from three aspects: positioning area, smart recommendation, and following accounts. Kuaishou also changed from its previous two-column multi-video display to the style of Douyin, proving that this style is very popular.

Here, the local page uses a double-column multi-video display method. I guess this is because the push method of the local page is completely based on the distance and there is no recommendation algorithm, so the video quality varies. This method should allow users to choose the specific content they are interested in.

However, after clicking to view a specific video, you can browse it by swiping down or up (swiping up is not supported after entering the first video on the local page).

The most important thing is that you can't swipe right to go back. Android can return through full-screen gestures, I am curious how Apple does it. If you can only click the arrow in the upper left corner to return, I feel that the operating experience is compromised (I specifically compared it with Kuaishou’s design for the same city, which allows you to return by swiping right).

Even after entering a video in the hotspot, you cannot swipe right to return. After comparing and entering the related reading on the recommendation page, you can swipe right to return. I guess the logic behind this is that after entering a hot topic or the same city, it is like entering a new module containing multiple videos, highlighting the integrity of the category or the differences between different levels, and the logic is clearer.

② Recommended page details

Figure 6 Recommended page details

The recommendation page is the core page of Douyin, which assumes the function of " hub " and has the trend of building an ecosystem and a platform .

• The entrance to traffic, the page where the most users gather.
• The traffic distribution station mainly focuses on advertising, ByteDance’s applications, small games, e-commerce, other related users and videos, etc. The main ways are the entrance above the account and the related readings and videos below.

From the user's perspective, this method greatly satisfies the user's desire to explore more information. This experience is great.

Because users want to know and will click when they want to get something. It is completely interest-driven, and the operation is simple, just click and you get it.

From the company's perspective, there are several advantages:

First, it introduced many new businesses (such as Douyin Encyclopedia) in a non-abrupt manner, connected the company's existing businesses, and facilitated cooperation with other companies' APPs.

Second, this type of click makes the user portrait more accurate, making it easier to push content in a more targeted manner in the future.

③ Video introduction area

The function of playing other related videos with one click is great, but Kuaishou doesn’t have it yet. This method makes it convenient for video creators to re-create other people's videos and for users to understand the cause and effect.

So far, we have discovered that the part below the music can be presented in the following ways:

• "No imitation" prompt.
• The content is marked as hot topics (major lists) and an entry is provided to view content related to the current hot topics.
• The current video may belong to a video collection, providing an entry to other videos in the video collection.
• Link to headlines and provide an entry for reading related articles.
• Link to Xigua Video, which provides access to related videos and TV series.
• …

So far, we have discovered that the upper part of the account name may be presented in the following ways:

① Positioning (two methods)

The first is city positioning. Click it to enter the recommendation page of that city, which includes food, drink, entertainment, accommodation and check-in videos. You can also mark the places you want to go to and form a wish list.

The second type is the positioning of offline merchants, which displays relevant group purchase packages, positioning (navigation function jumps to Baidu Maps) and one-click contact with merchants, as well as check-in videos with evaluation tags, etc. (I specifically opened Meituan and looked at the group purchase section. Most of the Meituan group purchase packages are available at the same price.

The payment method is Alipay. I don’t know whether it is interoperable with Meituan’s data or just uses Alipay as the payment method, because the location display, evaluation, and quantity purchased are inconsistent with Meituan and Dianping.

Of course, it is also possible to do point placement, so that merchants and Meituan can determine the purchase entry point to do data statistics and evaluate the effectiveness of the advertisement. ）

② Props (shooting effects)

Click to quickly view videos shot with the same props, or quickly take photos of the same style. The small designs here are also very thoughtful. For short videos marked with props, the shooting tab below will change to the same prop animation, and you can shoot immediately with one click.

③ Shopping entrance

It is usually related to the video content, but some are just influencers promoting products and have nothing to do with the video content.

Promotion of various application software, including Jianying, Xigua Video, etc., as well as other applications. Generally, you can enter the details page to download by clicking.

Mini program. Including click-to-play mini-games, small tests, Mango TV and other app mini-programs. There are many mini-programs in the entrance "Me - More - Mini-Programs".

On the page, Douyin has a mini-program promotion plan, calling on video creators to create videos based on existing mini-programs to promote the mini-programs. Creators can obtain a share of the promotion fees and mini-program revenues.

Mini program production is also a big industry. I don’t know how much ByteDance is involved in. Currently known ones include Toutiao Encyclopedia, Tik Tok Mini Games, Toutiao, etc. Some companies’ mini programs will have reminders to renew their subscriptions when they are expired, which seems to be one of TikTok’s monetization methods.

Compared with Kuaishou’s design for mini-programs and various entrances, Douyin has more directions and there are obviously many more videos that include this function.

The advantage is that it is very convenient for the extension of business, and the disadvantage is that it reduces the visual range of the video (because I personally feel that there are indeed too many of them). Too much may cause user disgust.

In addition, I am not a big fan of the green label for positioning and the opaque red label for games. Although they are more conspicuous, they destroy the overall color feeling. Being conspicuous also means that it is easier to attract attention and increase disgust (I prefer the feeling that Kuaishou gives me, but after watching it too much, maybe the content will reduce this feeling. It may also be a problem of my personal aesthetics. After all, it is hard to explain why I like this kind of thing).

Kuaishou has added an operation for recommending its own franchise stores. After clicking, the products will be presented, and you can chat online, consult, and make phone calls with just one click. I searched for the same video on TikTok, and it was displayed on the author's details page.

The advantage of the former is that it is simpler (but some do not have identity marks such as blue V, and anyone can add this function, which may increase the pressure of review), and the advantage of the latter is that it is more rigorous, adding the merchant module to the author's page to better distinguish different users. The user's merchant identity must be verified first, and then this function will be given to people with merchant identities.

The rotating vinyl record in the lower right corner and the music introduction below the introduction point to the same interface. I personally feel that there is some overlap in functions.

The reason is that some of the music descriptions give the original music, while many others are "Original soundtrack created by XXX (user account name) - XXX (user account name)", which is of little value. In addition, the spinning vinyl record has no other information, except that it is cool.

I guess the reason for keeping two is to take into account the operator's habits and retain the convenience of one-handed operation with either hand. In addition, it may also maintain the tone of the entire software design.

But my first thought when I saw the vinyl record was NetEase Cloud Music, not TikTok Music. If it were me, I might do a questionnaire survey to see if users care about the BGM name and analyze the click-through rates of the two places.

My personal preference is to remove the vinyl record elements and move four elements such as avatar comments downwards to give the short video a larger presentation area and reduce the obstruction on the right side of the short video in the small window (similar to the design of Kuaishou). In addition, this design fits TikTok in that it can further reduce the complexity of the page caused by multiple presentations of the mini program.

(2) Long press function and share function

Figure 7 Long press function page and share page (processed, personal information is hidden, all are different users)

Long press the page to open four functions: watch together, not interested, favorite, and save locally (the last three functions are the same as Kuaishou and Weishi, but Kuaishou has an additional report function and Weishi has an additional help function).

Watching together is also a manifestation of one-to-one or multi-person social interaction, similar to the function of watching a movie together. Reducing the reporting function may be due to strong confidence in the company's own review function.

Based on my own experience, Kuaishou may see short video recommendations with very low or even 0 likes. Douyin has not had this situation for the time being, which may also be the reason why Kuaishou has added a reporting function.

The one-click sharing function below simplifies the process of sharing with friends on TikTok. This area exists for both long pressing and sharing, and the priority display of friends highlights the importance that Tik Tok places on the design of its own friend function.

More sharing options include QQ, WeChat, Duoshan and Toutiao. There is a certain delay after clicking, and the sharing experience for QQ and WeChat is very poor. There is only a string of unknown text and garbled characters. You need to copy it and then open Douyin to search using the search box.

On the other hand, Kuaishou can send links, and the sharing process experience is good. In addition, Kuaishou can also share to QQ space, Moments, Weibo, Twitter, Telegram, etc., with a wide range of services. Douyin feels that it has been sanctioned by Pony Ma. This may also be the reason why Douyin appropriately hides this part of the function and highlights the design of social functions.

Other functions in sharing: co-shooting (for convenient video creation), help to become popular (TikTok monetization), save locally, report, favorite, not interested, watch together, forward, TikTok code (for convenient sharing, also cannot be shared directly to WeChat, need to save locally first and share as picture), dynamic wallpaper (only suitable for full-screen videos, the function is very good, limited by the video quality, I feel this is also a direction for short video bloggers), copy link (the link cannot be opened in WeChat).

(3) Comments

Figure 8 Two ways to display comments

How to pop up the comments on Douyin: click the comment symbol (on Kuaishou, you can click the text in the video introduction to enter the comment page, which is better for left-handed users).

Comment display method: cover two-thirds of the screen. This approach allows people to focus more on the content of the comments. The logic should be that comments usually occur after watching the video content, so there is not much meaning in presenting the entire video when commenting. The overall interaction feels simple and direct.

Kuaishou's intention in doing this may be, on the one hand, to meet the needs of watching videos while reading comments without affecting the size of the comment area. On the other hand, it may be due to UE considerations. The whole process is smoother and in line with Kuaishou's overall design grid. How to say it, it feels exquisite, silky and rounded.

We compared other small interactive interface designs of the two products. For example, when you swipe left on the video page for the first time, Kuaishou did not directly enter the video blogger's personal page, while Douyin seemed more straightforward.

These are two different design styles, but they are indeed consistent. It is difficult to say which one is more popular. It depends on personal feeling. However, it is still quite surprising that Kuaishou can display the complete content of the video without any obstruction when swiping left for the first time.

Comment sorting: Comments with higher likes and author replies are displayed first, and the other sorting feels a bit messy. In general, I feel the influence of several factors:

Comment time, whether the commenter has any works (based on the speculation of promoting friendship and diverting traffic to other works), replies to the comment, the number of times other users visit the commenter's homepage, etc. (also based on the speculation of promoting friendship).

Comment section culture: This needs to be felt more carefully. My good friends on Kuaishou seem to prefer picture battles.

(4) Progress bar

Some videos have a progress bar that can be dragged. But Douyin’s progress bar is close to the sides of the screen (Kuaishou leaves some space).

This method of Tik Tok may cause accidental touches on the Android side. But considering the design style and the low incidence of accidental touches of the function, it seems understandable.

(5) Friends and Messages section

Douyin has created a separate tab for this part, showing its determination to engage in social communication . It may be hoping to reduce the impact of WeChat and QQ on the short video industry.

My understanding is that there are many ways to entertain, but social communication is a rigid need. Compared with changing the way of entertainment and changing the way of communication, changing the way of entertainment is easier.

Douyin’s current goal is probably not to compete with WeChat and QQ, and even in the future it will be quite difficult to do so. I think the main purpose is to improve user retention and stickiness through this function.

I think there are several reasons why short videos are not awkward for social communication. First, local functions and short videos can better show the characteristics of a person's interests and life, making it possible to establish friends. Second, it is convenient for communication among acquaintances. Third, it may also facilitate communication between merchants and buyers (this is just speculation, and shopping in the live broadcast room still needs to be experienced).

The logic behind this should be that it is much easier for a software to bundle you with your friends than to bundle you alone. Another logic similar to chat software is that if there is a new message in the message box, out of curiosity, the user should open the software to take a look.

Friends: People who care about each other. The friend page displays video updates, and on the message page you can send messages, voice messages, voice calls, and video calls to your friends (the last three are only available to friends).

According to official instructions, friend recommendations come from three sources: your or other people’s address books, fans and people you follow, and people you have mutual friends with.

It can be roughly divided into two types: the first is social networking among acquaintances, mainly based on recommendations from the address book. The second type is stranger social networking, which mainly includes fans and people you follow and people you have mutual friends with.

Advantages of short video social networking: There are many reasons to become friends on the Internet, including appearance, interests, talents, etc. The short video covers this content very well. The general logic of stranger social interaction is as follows:

Figure 9 Friend relationship establishment process

For the initiator of following, this operation, which is similar to sending a friend request, is easier to accept and there will be no embarrassment of being rejected or ignored by others.

Because following is a very common operation in the short video function. But others choose to follow you back, which proves that they are also interested in you. In this process, short videos become a way for you to get to know each other and make it possible for you to build relationships.

Similarly, short videos are also one of your topics. If the other party opens up privacy operations such as displaying liked videos and following lists, you will know more and also have more topics to talk about.

For the party being followed, because they are in a passive position, they have a natural advantage in the process of making friends. They can choose to ignore or follow each other. Compared to liking, following implies a long-term understanding, so the party being followed will get a hint that the follower is interested in him or her, which makes it very likely that a relationship will be established.

The distance display on the same city page also provides greater possibilities for establishing friendships.

The disadvantage of this kind of stranger social interaction is that it may lead to some unspeakable transactions. This should be a common problem. Apart from strengthening supervision, the only thing left is to learn from the lessons of other software. After all, netizens are so smart that even software like Xianyu have been taken advantage of. But the new problem brought by regulation is privacy...

For short video communication with acquaintances, short video social networking can also reduce embarrassment while maintaining relationships. It’s similar to the feeling of not chatting on WeChat but leaving messages to each other in the Moments.

What I am more confused about is that if two people are chatting on the TikTok interface and they add each other on WeChat, then in a sense, does this reduce the time spent using TikTok?

Or let's look at it from another angle. I tell you on WeChat that there's an interesting video recently, and then you might go to Douyin to take a look, but you end up being attracted by other content and spend more time on Douyin. Then it's a win-win situation for Douyin and WeChat, but Kuaishou is obviously more advantageous.

I don't have a deep understanding of stranger social networking. I'm going to try apps like Momo and AiLiao and then think about it. As for video shooting and live streaming, I also need to experience it more deeply.

3. ByteDance’s future development prospects from TikTok

Figure 10 Recommendation logic

The longer the user uses the app, the more user data it obtains, the deeper and more accurate its understanding of the user becomes, the more precise the push notifications become, and the more users like to use the app.

The more users there are, the more statistical data the app obtains, and the company is more able to discover new business possibilities and predict the corresponding possible scale, making its layout more targeted than ever before. (This is my guess based on the application of big data).

Finally, multiple applications are connected in series to form an entire ecosystem (I personally feel that a large cross-domain ecosystem is very difficult), so that the more applications users use, the more they rely on other upstream and downstream applications. Then, a "ByteDance Card" will be introduced to allow users to use ByteDance applications for free, or a ByteDance Gold Card membership will be introduced to allow users to enjoy additional experiences in all businesses.

With this logic, we can get a glimpse of ByteDance’s business (not complete!!!)

Figure 11 Byte related services

Figure 12 Overall logical thinking

First, through large-scale activities, other software, and the star effect, new traffic is accumulated for several major software, and these software will also feed back part of the traffic to them.

Toutiao, Douyin and other softwares divert traffic to each other. Through different forms of recommendation pages, other software that users may be interested in can be accurately promoted. Other software provides creators with more creative materials and better creative capabilities.

In all major content-based software, users and content influence each other, traffic makes content creation more motivated, and content creation maintains traffic.

Develop various tool products to support related products. With the development of related products, promote the development of tool products.

As for the construction of the entire ecosystem, the existing one-click publishing to Douyin Toutiao and Xigua Video, the same account has multiple APPs. In the future, it may be possible to give discounts using specific payment tools, interconnection of membership functions of multiple APPs, etc.

IV. Conclusion

The overall feeling of TikTok is simple and straightforward: I will give you everything you are interested in directly.

However, as the cornerstone of ByteDance's future development, the product will become very complex, mainly reflected in the connection between functions and businesses (e-commerce is also relatively complex).

If I were to offer suggestions for TikTok (they may be a bit personal, and some of them may deviate from the product positioning to a certain extent, but I feel that TikTok is an inevitable trend towards platformization), they are roughly as follows:

Optimize the overall page layout and improve user experience. Please refer to the analysis in the second part for details.

Optimize push algorithm.

Due to the addition of topics and shooting effects, although the video output has been improved and the shooting threshold has been lowered, the video similarity will be very high and the content volume will be very small. After all, people will get tired of aesthetics. The best way is to optimize the recommendation algorithm, increase the interval between pushes of content shot with the same props, and reduce the number of pushes.

Make some video content more in-depth and informative.

The more diverse the content is, the better, so that it can satisfy more users. However, the fate of fast food culture is to be replaced by another fast food culture.

If Tik Tok wants to achieve sustainable development and become more competitive, it needs to spend more effort on guiding creators and provide more resources for high-quality content. It is not entirely correct to rely solely on current users as the guide for video content.

In a sense, people are always growing. As this group of users grows older, entertainment is responsible for relieving stress, and in-depth content may be the basis for retaining them.

Extend more services outward.

In the section where the mini program is located, you can try to promote preschool education and parenting courses for parents in mother and baby videos.

The reason is that the users’ age is at a relevant stage. The high educational demands for their children in first- and second-tier cities should bring high conversion rates. It is also a good time to launch educational software, which can be used from an early age and accompany children throughout their lives. After I finished writing, I found that the Fan Deng Reading app in the Douyin search mainly promotes parent-child content and also supports voice. Then when I searched for fitness, there was an advertisement for Keep. I was disgusted. I have no idea what to suggest).

Fortunately, medical health has not yet launched this function, so it is recommended to connect it to the app. The general idea of ​​promotion is to invite famous doctors on the app to share some commonly used health care tips and make some videos, making use of the famous doctor effect. The content will mostly be about how to recuperate after staying up late, how to recuperate girls' health, etc., or you can promote a psychologist. This may also have the potential to be promoted. Or link to the novel business and so on.

Strengthen cooperation with Alibaba.

The specific idea is to work with the Hema Fresh department, and the promotion method is food videos. Cooks can pack all the raw materials with one click to make the same dish. Snack sharing is similar, and users are supported to delete and add other products by themselves, etc. Hema is responsible for the mini program and delivery.

The reason is that it fits the users' petty-bourgeois taste, and Hema's layout in first- and second-tier cities is also very complete. Compared with the long delivery time of other shopping products, delivery in about an hour is very attractive. Taking this opportunity, we are considering launching a lifestyle app to teach cooking, share recipes, etc. (After writing this, I searched for advertisements on Xiaohongshu…)

This is probably to counter the sanctions from Tencent. We can try to explore the possibility of cooperation from more angles (since we are both doing payment, we have offended both sides, so it is better to keep one side stable and continue to fantasize.

The above is some immature analysis of Douyin. I hope my friends can give me more advice!

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