Humane Design : Behavioural design and Tech for Humanity
Tags: Teenagers, Contents, Harmful, Social Media, Addicted

Young age, being harm by Tiktok

In the present, There are many social media platforms that are popular today and have a large number of users, which has users from children to adults. When playing social media, there are both pros and cons that affect users. So, we choose the problem arising out of Tiktok application, TikTok is a social media platform that allows users to create and share 15-second to 60-second looping videos. The videos often include short musical snippets along with sound and visual effects. Users can then like, comment on, share and favorite videos. And the problem that we have found is videos that contain inappropriate content.

Which is a problem that arises from the freedom of posting contents created by many types of worldwide users which some of the contents are harming the policy of violation such as nudity, sexual activity, bullying, suicide, self-harm, etc. Due to the users in every age use TikTok and might lack consciousness and maturity tend to follow the violation contents and can be harm to self and others. Moreover, we want to make adults care more when their children playing Tik Tok and show that some of the content users post can contain explicit language, suggestive themes, and lewd gestures.

OUR PROCESS

Explore

Tiktok, is the newest application on trend. Loads of people consuming Tiktok in terms of both creator and consumer. And there are many different kinds of content that Tiktok provided. Eventually, there is some content that might cause bad effects to users due to the variety of worldwide users who are the content creators or consumers. Moreover, most of the users are young-ages and some of them can not analyze the information that they received from video. Is it good for them or not. As well as the following problems which users might copy behavior from what they are consuming which can be both good and bad.

Define

In this process, we decided to define the main users of Tiktok and also the amount of users who use Tik Tok on global and also in Thailand to narrow down what we wanted to focus on. As we know that Tiktok is a large online platform, some of the users are addicted to this application by the ethical design that they created. For example, the design of dark pattern: Limited 15–60 second per video with full screen to get the user’s attention as much as possible and algorithms that play video on the pattern that an user is interested in. These dark patterns can make users waste their time. Including variable reward which the user won’t know the content of next one and it will make the user feel surprised and unexpected to make the user keep scroll down which can be addictive.

We did the survey and interview about how well people know Tiktok application to see the difficulty of using it in different features that are provided in TikTok original design, in order to know the insight from the real users and also can test the user’s knowledge of Tiktok application about how much do they know how to use this application. Are they able to categorize between good and harmful contents, did they know how to report malicious videos and others features.

Moreover, we gathered all the problems that we found in an article, dark patterns and humane design to see the big picture and try to scope down the problems.

List of problems:

Violating children’s privacy

Inappropriate contents

Continually contents

Social influence

Tiktok banned in India

And we decided to focus on Content violation mostly for underage and we set our goal as To decrease number of content violation

After we get the main problem, we go through all the features screen by screen to know the steps in every feature in order to find the perfect match spot of our problem. We came up within 3 main features that we wanted to develop.

Report system : the original report button is a little bit hard to notice. It’s been hidden in the share button, and uses tiny text to describe the reason to report which are too complex for users who do not know. Sensitive content : this feature will help Tiktok to filter their content that might contain inappropriate content but it might have benefits in an academic way before they post on the public. Caution before post : we began with functions on the posting process that might be a bit tricky for a beginner, we decided to improve and add some functions that can educate users about the rules of using the application and the punishment if they prohibit.

Ideate

After we generate the problem and features that we wanted to develop to cause good effect for users to have better experience and achieve the goal that we set. we brainstorm the ideas and using some tools to help us design new feature such as humane design:

Respectful : give out an opportunity for users to have their own right to consume and adjust some the features or evil design not to annoy the users.

: give out an opportunity for users to have their own right to consume and adjust some the features or evil design not to annoy the users. Inclusive : Every user can easily understand the features and process, make it visualize for better communication

: Every user can easily understand the features and process, make it visualize for better communication Resilient : User be able to control and set content control and community moderator

After finding solutions, we have 4 main ideas to help users using Tik Tok by raising awareness for users. We will try to educate them with the information about harmful video that they are lacking, make it more visualized and easy to understand even for people who are young age. Moreover, we are going to make sure that they really understand throughout the process and don’t ignore when they see something harmful. Last of all, we hope that our design didn’t cause any bad behavior with users

Develop

First design, we modify the report system which for the old system, the report button is in the share button. It is hard for users that might don’t know where is report button and they will give up to report due to they cannot find the button and don’t know where to vent these content ,moreover Tik tok doesn’t have any guide or introduction in report system for first times using. So in the new design, we put the report button into the main page on the top left and has stand out color and glowing on the feed screen that shows the video in TikTok to make users can see it and notice and convenient to report the bad content videos. Moreover, when you click in report button, it will show you to choose reason why you want to report this video.For choose reason page, for old page, it will show the reason in text for 14 title that look to clutter so we re-design to make it in group for 8 types and have more visual and easy to understand the meaning and reasons for each topic. Then after they understand, they can continue TikToking later on.

Second design, Punishment we design punishment for users who infringe the rules or keep posting harmful video even we educate them in user-onboarding and they also made a contract before first time log in. If they get reported from others user they will be punished by our team follow by the terms of service and we will have more advanced task for them to do before they returning to our application

The terms of punishment:

When they infringed the rules they have to do advanced task than before to type about 150 letters, explaining about why the videos that Ai shows is violent. Then they will be able to go to next step which is pause the account usage for as long as they had infringed the rules in that steps (which has 4 steps).

Step 1 : First warning (3 day break) = reported from 10 accounts

Step 2 : Yellow flag (1 week break)= reported from 50 accounts

Step 3 : Red flag (1 month break) reported from 70 accounts

Step 4 : Black flag (permanently closed the account) = report from 100 accounts

* the punishment will be available within 90 days. If more than 90 days, users will be started to count the 1st step again**

Third design, we add sensitive content which censor the content violation before users click to watch this video due to generally, video about violence, pornography or hate group imagery cannot post in TikTok but exceptional those content that including with artistic, medical, health or educational. So we censor those content to be sensitive content to shield people who don’t want to see and swipe to watch other videos continually.

Fourth design, we make caution before post. Before users come to post their own video, Ai will analyze and preliminary check the video before posting. If these videos have one type of each violation content, It will pop-up to caution users before posting that it will show “Are you sure to post this video?” and then users click “learn more” it will show what type of content violation that you’re going to post and bring them to learn more in each type of violation. then it will come back to the posting page. From doing this, we wanted to remind them before posting and reduce the amount of violation content that was published.

For our final solution, we have designed 4 new designs to solve the problem which is the number of content violations that were published in many videos in Tiktok, people will watch and lead to follow those videos that can make them harmful and insecure and we give the decision to users who want to watch the violation content or not and punishment rules that users might lead to follow and aware to post the inappropriate content.

. . .

In this case study, we learn so many things during the research, ideate and designing to create the solution that solves the Tik tok’s problem. To develop more about this project, we would do more testing, research and learn more from data and refine the solution to put it in the real using situation. Hope you enjoy and have learned from our case study. Be reported to the video violation contents in Tik Tok to help us decrease the number of them and avoid those video access to minors.

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