It is safe to assume that all of us are familiar with Tik-Tok by now. Whether you love or hate the app, it is everywhere. As the app grows, we see it is being used more for marketing purposes and pushing our products to consumers. But before the user can be influenced, we need to take a step back and look at the design of Tik-Tok and if the swipe-up design is innovative or has been seen before.

If you are one of the few unfamiliar with Tik Tok, it is an app available on all smartphones. Users download the app and can make short videos of them doing anything – dancing, cooking, giving advice, or even pranking people. This concept is not new; we saw the rise of short-form videos take off in 2014 with the rise of Vine, an almost identical platform that saw short-term success. Vine’s success and downfall bring into question whether Tik Tok will see the same fate?
I think a significant factor is looking deeper into the user experience of the two and understanding why so many people love Tik Tok.

Tik Toks user experience incorporates aspects of other popular apps such as Instagram, Vine, and Snapchat in a user-friendly and intuitive. Upon opening the app, you will see a plus sign at the bottom of the screen, which most users know means to add or create something. The user can create and edit their short video when the button is clicked. Users can also add filters, a caption, and hashtags to gain traction on their videos, similar to the Instagrams algorithm.
When it comes to the primary function of watching user videos, users can swipe up or down to see new or previous videos. When a video is seen and liked, a user can easily double tap the screen to “like” or heart the video. This process also feeds into the algorithm and will bring up more videos similar to those that the user likes. The concept of swiping and liking posts is not new. We have seen this in some of the most popular apps, such as Instagram, Tinder, and Twitter. However, Tik Tok is different; they have made the user feel they are in an endless scroll where there will never be an end. Compared to other apps such as Instagram, the user generally gets to a point where they had scrolled back far enough to see the first photo they saw when they last logged in.

Additionally, Tik Tok recently changed the explore tab to a friends tab where users can now see what their friends are posting instead of curated videos that Tik Tok believes they will enjoy. Users can use the search bar at the top of the page on the friend’s tab to search for hashtags, other users, or anything else. I think this new tab is not only intuitive but beneficial for those who want to see what their friends are up to. This tab is very similar to Instagram since it only features the people you have decided to follow instead of random people.

With all this in mind, we need to review our initial question: is the design redundant? I believe no. I think that while Tik Tok undoubtedly took significant aspects of other apps, such as the swiping features and double tapping to like, the platform did not steal color schemes, explore page format, or share video functions from similar apps. Furthermore, I believe that every good concept at some point is taken and adapted to become even more successful, and in the case of Tik Tok came in when the market was hot, and users knew what they did and did not want.

What do you think? Did Tok Tok steal their user experience design(s)?