Case Study: The Ethical Redesign of the TikTok User Experience

The controversy behind TikTok – one of the most popular social media apps today – goes well beyond its highly addictive personalized algorithm. Through utilizing dark design patterns, designers contribute to this issue, exploiting their knowledge of psychology and design to use against users. What can be done to rethink TikTok’s customer user experience? How can the redesign respect the customer and renew a feeling of trust?

These were the questions that I started out with in my college thesis. And here’s how things changed:

BEFORE

AFTER

The final prototype is based on user feedback and tested to ensure that it works smoothly.

Only after numerous iterations was I able to come up with the final prototype, which is available through Figma, and focuses on the new features I added while still respecting the integrity of TikTok’s original UI. 

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NOTE: This case study is a summary of my university thesis, The Importance of Ethics in UX Design: A Redesign of TikTok.