UX Designer ROASTS your favorite mobile apps: TikTok, Instagram, Spotify

What is up amigos, amigas, amigues? How's it going? Hello. It is a very, very gloomy overcast day. I'm feeling a little cozy. I just baked cookies. I had like six of them. They were delicioso. But anyways, hi, my name is Greta. If you've never seen me before, I'm so honored, so honored that you're here. I'm a UX designer or a user experience designer. I work in e-commerce, so I'm customer facing. If you have absolutely no idea what a UX designer is or does, another term that people often use interchangeably with UX designer is product designer. We create, we curate these digital experiences like Instagram, like Spotify, like TikTok that are both useful for people like you so that you can accomplish a specific goal that you have, but they're also enjoyable. Did you know that by 2023, mobile apps are projected to generate over $100 billion in revenue? Yeah. Also mobile apps account for over 70% of digital media in the United States. And lastly, the average person opens over 10 mobile apps daily and 30 mobile apps monthly. On this very gloomy day here in DC, I thought it would be just a lot of fun to roast. I'm talking pollo in el horno, chicken in the oven, roast mobile apps. Some of your favorite mobile apps. Critique to pull apart, to give my unsolicited recommendations for these design teams on what can be done better. Okay, so the first one that I had to start with is one of the biggest apps that we have today, which is TikTok. If you don't know what TikTok is, it is essentially the vine of our generation. It is a doom scrolling app. I'm kidding. It is an app where you can just view so many different videos. They're usually short form videos, which means they don't last over three minutes. Those are the longest TikToks that I am aware that you can make. So when you ask terms, we have this thing called jobs to be done, which is essentially just what is the value proposition of this experience? What is the purpose of this experience? So TikTok, obviously, as we know, is to entertain, but also it's kind of become a place where you can learn. So it's to educate and it's also to inspire. I have learned a thing or two about like different recipes and also like traumas that I apparently need to resolve from my past. Now, the first thing that I want to talk about is the algorithm of TikTok, which essentially is how TikTok decides what kind of videos are going to show you on your for you page. A lot of the algorithm is based off of obviously what you consume and what you interact with. Interaction can be literally you like a video, you comment, you save it, you share it, but also it can just be how long you spend watching a video. Like if you watch a video multiple times through because TikToks, they tend to loop. Now, even if I don't favorite or comment or save a video and I watch it through, it doesn't mean that I want to see more content like that. Now, TikTok does have a feature where you can let them know that you're not interested in this type of content. You can see this when you go into the share button and it's under right next to report. It says not interested, but that is not into it. It's not. I did not know this existed until yesterday when I was preparing for this critique. So maybe this means just like on YouTube, you can like a video or you can dislike a video. It would be interesting if you could favorite a video, so heart the video or like broken heart the video, if that makes sense. So let them know that, no, I'm not interested. And it could be in this bottom right-hand corner where you have all of the call to actions. Now that being said, as much as I would prefer that the algorithm wouldn't really prioritize videos that I've just watched, but haven't specifically physically interacted with, I think it would still be nice to have a more obvious place, especially on your profile page, where you can see videos that you have previously watched. Now I know this also exists. You can go to your homepage and then I think it's in your settings and privacy. And then you can go to watch history from there. And again, I didn't know until I was preparing for this video that you have a watch history section. Now I don't know how often this is used, but a problem that I just, all the time happens to me all the time with Tik TOK is when I'm on my for you page and I'm scrolling. And the nice thing is that these videos do take up your entire screen so that like you're focused on the video. And it also kind of gamifies the experience because you don't know what the next video is going to be. But I feel like an issue with Tik TOK is that it's very easy for you to lose a video on the for you page. Let's say you accidentally refresh the homepage, the for you page, and then poof, the video is gone. Where'd she go? Now, if you know that the watch history setting exists, then you can easily go back to your hamburger menu and go in there. So it would be really cool if you could, if it could be added as one of these tabs on your profile where you could just see your previously watched videos. Do people go back to their watch history enough or want to view previously watched videos that they didn't favorite or like enough for it to be on the homepage? I don't know. I'm just letting them know something else that I have beef with Tik TOK about is all of the competing pieces of information that are on a single video because the video takes up the entire screen. You have the CTAs floating above the video, especially if you're someone who creates Tik TOK videos, you know how frustrating it can be when you're editing your video and you're adding text on top of your video. And then you realize, oh my God, you upload it. And you realize that some of your text is hidden behind some of these icons. It would be nice if Tik TOK could have an option to collapse these CTAs or you could even move them around so that if it is blocking something, you can move it out of the way. That would be really cool. Now I know Instagram does not need an introduction, but let's talk about Instagram's jobs to be done. You can stay connected with other people. People used to only be able to post photos, but now it's kind of become a place where you can post videos. You can post these things called reels. It's really become not just a place where you want to see what your friends are doing, but also a place where you learn a lot of new things. You get inspired, you get motivated. It's become very complicated. Now, the first part of Instagram that I have a lot of beef with is the fact that it is so hard to find posts that you have previously interacted with. Now, this is specifically important because Instagram, like I mentioned, has shifted from a platform where you're just like, okay, I want to see what my friends are doing today to, oh my gosh, okay, where is that recipe that I saw the other day that I want to cook for dinner tonight? It's really become a resource and when something is a resource, you refer to it a lot of times in the future. Instagram loves to make it unnecessarily difficult to find posts that you have previously liked. Now it's a little bit easier. Before it used to be under something that made no sense. I think it was like under account, but now under the hamburger menu, you have this thing called your activity and then here you can see posts and videos and things that you've shared and liked. Again, I feel like this does take a couple of steps to go to and it would be really nice if there was a view on your profile that only you could see. It's not something that other people would be able to see. You could go on your profile and then maybe you have a tab or maybe you have one of these buttons where it says edit profile, add tools, add shop. Maybe there's an activity button there and there you have a whole list of all the videos and the photos and everything that you've interacted with. I think that would be a lot more useful. It would be a lot easier to find. The fewer steps that you can have a user take, the better. The next thing I want to talk about is the explore page or the search page. I don't know if it's still called the explore page, but it's under the search icon. This page to me is just like TikTok's for you page where essentially it just shows you a bunch of content from people that you don't necessarily follow or you can discover new people on Instagram. You can discover new types of content and maybe it encourages you to then follow that user on Instagram. It's kind of like a Pinterest because it just shows you content that's not even necessarily related to each other and not only do you have photos, I don't know why I have a photo of Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck, you know, but I also have some reels. I have a reel of Zendaya there, you know, so it would be really cool if you were able to filter it. That's all I want. I just want the ability to maybe up in the upper right hand corner, the upper left hand corner, you can filter the kind of content that you're seeing. I'm not saying searching specifically because there is a search bar, but if you could filter by the type of content that you want to see. So let's say you're in public and you don't have headphones and you don't want to be suggested reels because you don't have headphones and you don't want to play it out loud. So it'd be cool if you could just filter just for photos. It could just be maybe a toggle because it's two options between photos and video and also I feel like these little tabs at the top are not very useful. They're like suggestions of what you can look for and A, they're not even things that I would have previously looked for, like I've never looked for wildlife photography. If they were more personalized and specific to things that I do interact with on Instagram, then maybe that would be useful. Okay, this is a little thing, but I just want to talk about it on your homepage. You have this little heart CTA at the upper right hand corner and that's your activity. Now the heart icon is not very clear to me that that is the activity or the notifications hub. It kind of makes me feel like it's a place where I can see what I've liked and that just is not what it is. I don't know what kind of icon off the top of my head. Instagram really likes their hearts, but you can't use it everywhere. Okay, we need to move on because we're going to talk about one of my favorite apps of all time, Spotify. Spotify is kind of a scary one for me because it really has become the standard in a lot of like the North Star for a lot of design teams, but there are there are there are a couple of things that I have some issues with. Okay, jobs to be done with Spotify. We all know it is a platform where you can listen to music and podcasts, but it is also curation, personalization, creating your own playlist, following other people's playlists. So the first thing I'm going to talk about is of course the homepage. We got the homepage. I really actually one thing I do love about Spotify is the the dark mode is the black background. This kind of reminds me of when you're like at a party or you're at a concert and everything is really dark around you and everything that's lit up is related to the music. Okay, so the first thing I want to focus on is that grid at the top. You have obviously no one other than Bad Bunnies, Un Verano Sin Ti. I have all my other music that I listen to, this grid specifically. Okay, now I kind of understand the purpose of it, but I kind of don't. Every other section here on the homepage is titled Trending Albums For You, You Have More Of What You Like, Recently Played, Your Shows, Your Top Mixes, etc. Because this section, this grid at the top is not titled, I can't be 100% sure what its purpose is. Is it my most recently listened to pieces of music? My most often listened to playlists and albums and artists? I don't know. Now the other thing I'm going to talk about is that you can't necessarily curate it. I feel like it's really based off of an algorithm that basically looks at your activity and decides what goes up top. But it would be really cool if maybe you could move this around, you could remove one, maybe you could create this grid yourself, pin up to six different artists or whatever. It could be artists, it could be podcasts, it could be albums, it could be playlists, whatever pieces of content that you want, you could pin them yourself to the top. Now the next thing I want to talk about are these individual sections on the homepage. Now I understand the purpose of them. I know that another part of Spotify is the discoverability portion of Spotify because a lot of stuff that comes with music is not just listening to what you like, but it's also discovering new albums, discovering new artists. A big part of user experience, a big part of the way that a user interacts with a specific platform is the information hierarchy. It is the order in which information is placed on a page. I am not understanding the information hierarchy on this page. Information hierarchy is often created based off of how we've learned to read information, which is usually top to bottom, left to right. Because of that, I don't understand why they wanted to put your shows higher than fresh new music because I don't listen to podcasts that often and because the state of the world has really been triggering me. I have not even been listening to the news podcast that I usually listen to, which is The Daily and Up First, so I kind of wish that was lower on the page. That's all I'm trying to say. An element that is extremely a huge miss with Spotify is the community part of Spotify. A lot of the experience with Spotify is like following your friends' playlists and seeing the type of music that your friends are listening to, and that is not present at all on the homepage. I think it would be really cool if Spotify wouldn't only recommend Spotify curated playlists. Now, Spotify, I understand you have a little bit of an ego. We all love you, but it would be cool if you would recommend. I'm speaking to Spotify directly right now. Hey, Spotify, it'd be really cool if you could specifically recommend playlists that are made by other people. Maybe that could be a part of your privacy settings where you could say like, do not recommend my playlist to random people on Spotify. And I know people on Spotify are really freaking proud of the playlists that they create. All the time people are like, oh my god, follow my playlist. The next thing I have a little bit of issue with Spotify is when it comes to curating your playlist. Let's say Bad Bunny comes out with his new album and you're like, oh my god, there are like a solid 10 songs on here that I absolutely love and I want to add them to my Latino playlist that I made myself. How do you do that? You would have to do that one by one. And that's where the problem lies. Ladies and gentlemen, you have to add each song individually. You would think that there would be a multi-select option, but it just does not exist. Another action that I feel like Spotify completely, completely ignores is the option to drag things. If on Spotify on any playlist, on any album or whatever, you can just click the song, long press and drag it, maybe drag it over to my library. And then let's say library opens and you're still holding and pressing onto the song and then you can just drop it into any playlist that you have. That would be so easy. Other than that Spotify, you're perfect. I'm so sorry. I roasted you just a little bit, but it's for your own good. And there you have it. I have officially seasoned, marinated, roasted the three, probably most used mobile apps today. If you work at any of these companies, let me know what you think. And also if you want to give me more information, if you are on one of these design teams, why you did, they did what they did. If you want me to do more of these, please let me know because I had so much fun. We could do Google drive, Google in general, like the search engine. Oh my God. There's so many, there's so many possibilities. That's all I got. So if you want to see more on my face, you can find me on Instagram. You can find me on Tik TOK, but I will see you in the next video. Adios.