Creator Tasks
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About
Creators on TikTok Shop earn income by selling products to their followers, making a percentage on each sale. We want to encourage consistent engagement with the platform through Creator Tasks: missions users can complete for rewards.
My initial involvement on this project was in Q3 2023, working on small improvements to content and introducing buttons to get people to engage with tasks. In Q4 of 2023, we had an opportunity to think through how we can redesign Creator Tasks for information clarity, scalability, and a better user experience.
Observing the task framework in Q3 2023, I observed high-level opportunities to improve the long-term user experience and framework. Below, you'll find a summary of the design opportunities that I presented to my team to gain their support.
Design opportunities
Ultimately, we want Creator Tasks to be a motivational and educational means to grow as a creator; from making their first shoppable video, to a first sale, to more sales and success on TikTok Shop. We observed several design opportunities:
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Tasks facilitate essential creator actions (e.g., discovering products and creating shoppable videos) packaged as missions. With agreement from the broader team, it was intuitive to expand the range of tasks to accommodate any key creator workflow.
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We explored content and visual enhancements to make entry to Task Center more prominent and enticing. In a recent user study, 5/8 people couldn’t find the entry point to Task Center.
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The home for tasks needed improvement to system architecture to organize active, completed, and past tasks.
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Previously, there was a lack of communication of steps to complete tasks and inconsistencies in how we communicated task states and rewards.
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We wanted to explore gamification concepts like leveling and badging to encourage users.
Discoverability
One of the areas needing improvement was task discovery. The primary way users discover tasks are in the Creator Center, where approximately 2% of users visited daily. Of those users, 20% viewed task center, 20% viewed details of tasks, and 10% completed tasks.
From the metrics above we can safely assume that:
Improving discovery of tasks outside of Creator Center and
Making task detail pages more actionable would improve activation numbers
Task details
The detail page serves to clearly communicate task details (rules, deadlines, rewards) and help users get started with previews (both viewable and actionable) and guidance. Tasks strategically leverage existing core creator workflows to do the heavy lifting.
Leveling
Internally, we assign users levels based on their monthly sales. For example, level 1 would indicate that you’ve made one sale. Level 2 may indicate that you make an average of $1000 monthly sales.
From a past project about leaderboards and rankings, we surveyed 55 creators. Generally, 41.8% liked the idea of rankings, while 58.2% didn't. Looking deeper into the 'no' responses, we found that levels and rankings were seen negatively. People felt they could be discouraging, especially for new creators who haven't made a sale yet.
These findings helped our team move away from displaying explicit levels and instead explore concepts around milestones and badges, which feel more like accomplishments than a label to compare against others.
In a foundational study conducted in January 2024, 7 out of 8 participants preferred badges. This month, we're conducting another round of research to confirm this preference over milestones, which is a similar concept but communicates accomplishments numerically rather than through badges.
Next steps
Included in this launch are campaigns; branded tasks for special events and promotions. As for next steps, we’re looking to observe task performance overtime and make adjustments to our experience based on our learnings.
