TikTok Groove

Role → UX designer
Timeline → January 2024 - March 2024
Software → Figma, After Effects, Google Forms, Slido, FaceTime, Zoom

01

Project overview

TikTok Groove is a conceptual platform extension aimed at empowering dancers and choreographers through community-building and skill enhancement. It introduces innovative features like AI-guided feedback, interactive studio sessions, and advanced discovery tools to foster creativity and connection in the global dance community.

What I did

As co-team leader, I managed communication and delegated tasks effectively, ensuring the team operated cohesively. I spearheaded user research, designing surveys and conducting interviews to gather valuable insights from our target audience. I took full responsibility for filming and producing contextual videos used in in-class prototyping, choreographed and executed the live prototyping, and created the entire user flow diagrams on Figma. Additionally, I contributed to the high-fidelity screen designs in Figma, showcasing my ability to combine strategic leadership with hands-on design and production expertise.
A banner with screens of TikTok Groove.

02

The Problem

Dancers looking to improve their skills often find it difficult to access niche choreography or receive detailed, personalized feedback. At the same time, choreographers struggle to gain visibility and recognition for their work, with current platforms failing to support effective discoverability or real-time connections with learners.
TikTok Groove was designed to bridge this gap, offering a space where both dancers and choreographers can connect, share their talents, and enhance their creative growth—addressing the lack of targeted resources and community support in the dance world.
To achieve those conclusions, we conducted thorough user research, performed a competitor analysis, and reviewed relevant literature.

03

User Research

We began with sending a preliminary user survey to 21 dancers and/or choreographers, asking if they found difficulty in finding a centralized platform for their dance-focused needs. Here's what they said:
“TikTok gets bombarded with other topic and interests on your for you page … difficult to find a for you page catered to only dancing.”
“On TikTok the dancing being shared is … not actual performances or class videos … hard to find new dance creators if they are not tied to your circle … challenging for someone new.”
“I would love a streamlined way to discover choreographers and dancers …”
Then, to further understand our intended user base, we conducted interviews with 4 dancers heavily involved in the dance community. We asked 7 in-depth questions that helped us understand dancers' online behaviors, preferences, challenges, and desires for enhancing their dance experiences through digital platforms.
After analyzing and summarizing the insights, interviewees’ opinions fit into three categories:
🕺 Niche styles
Current platforms do not offer capabilities to search for niche styles and related choreography, especially Black-created styles.
🫂 Lack of community
One interviewee noted a lack of a strong dance community near him. It’s hard to find classes and get choreographers to come to his area.
🗂️ Organization
All interviewees expressed frustration at not having one place to access different dance styles, choreography, and other dancers.
A list of 7 interview questions.

04

Competitive Analysis

Besides the obvious platforms (TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube, YouTube Shorts), we were only able to find one example of a dance/choreography focused social media platform.
Ayoo Dance
The social platform was meant to act as a global network for dancers. It was vastly similar to our idea in terms of general concept and intended features, but the platform seems to be completely out of commission (no longer on the App Store).
Ayoo Dance screens.

05

Literature Review

We explored a variety of material: academic papers, articles, and online forums, to get an expansive view on the dancer and choreographer space.
Academia
Our team perused 10 academic papers on dancing, social media, technology, and the intersections of those 3 topics to gain even more insight. Here’s what we learned:
💻 Opportunity for dance improvement technology

New technologies to support dance and choreography creation, like AI tracking of body movements and offering feedback to learners, can be used to revolutionize the dance space online.
⭕ Opportunity for choreographer-focused features
Social media often has a hard time attributing credit to original creators, especially in the case of trends. There’s a need to allow choreographers to highlight and keep record (a “living resume”) of their contributions.
🛒 Untapped market for dancers

Current platforms fail to provide dance creators with the recognition and support they need to create. There’s opportunity for a space for dancers to create authentically and without pressure to succeed.
Articles + online forums
We also explored online opinions from dancers (professional or recreational), choreographers, and people consuming dance content. We specifically sought out opinions and thoughts about TikTok and its impact on the dance community due to our core intention of piggybacking off of TikTok, and the need for differentiation. Here’s what we found:
🕺 Choreographers’ perspective
Online popularity doesn’t translate professionally. Slow and steady process allows for longevity & provides a good foundation for a career. Up-and-coming dancers aren’t learning from real sources and aren’t able to work long hours for rehearsals (in industry).
📺 Audience perspectives
TikTok’s algorithm makes it difficult to discover new dancers and niche choreography, and the platform tends to focus more on appearance than skill. Additionally, feedback pointed to an overemphasis on repetitive and Western-centric content, which often lacks the depth and intricacy that dancers and choreographers seek.

06

Ideation

To get a sense of what we’re creating, we established user flow charts based on three targeted user groups: choreographers, dancers, and viewers.
Choreographer's User Flow
Figma user flow diagrams in the choreographer's perspective.
Dancer's User Flow
Figma user flow diagrams in the dancer's perspective.
Viewer's User Flow
Figma user flow diagrams in the viewer's perspective.

07

First Prototype

For our initial prototype, we chose to focus on a dancer’s experience and perspective using TikTok Groove – specifically their experience of watching a tutorial and getting feedback on their attempt at a dance.
Groove Tutorials
With this feature, we aimed to directly address difficulties with skill improvement from a dancer’s perspective, due to a lack of tutorial resources and feedback from experienced dancers.
Verified choreographers on TikTok Groove post quality tutorials.
A dancer attempts to learn from this choreographer. However, she seems to be struggling with it…
AI Feedback
If you’ve ever tried to learn a dance before on your own, it can be a struggle as you don’t know whether you got the moves right or not. To address this common issue, we implemented AI feedback to help detect and correct wrong movements.
This AI feedback is given before a user even decides to post their attempt.
As we can see, the dancer was successful in her attempt!
Timestamped Comments
In a virtual setting, it may be difficult to clearly explain feedback for a specific dance move. By adding the ability for users to timestamp their comments, people will be able to provide contextualized feedback.
You're able to scrub the video, and with TikTok Groove's timestamped comments, you're able to see feedback for that particular part of a dance.
Screen showing timestamped comments at the time scrubber of a TikTok video.
Verified choreographers’ feedback are also highlighted and pinned at the top, as they are the most qualified to give feedback.
Screen showing highlighted feedback commented by a verified choreographer.

08

User Testing: First Prototype

Before I get into specifics on user testing, it’s important to contextualize the space in which we carried it out. My team chose to prototype our features in front of a live audience of ~150 other design students. As such, we had to tweak the user experience to better allow the involvement of the entire lecture hall rather than a classic, one-to-one, user-to-product interaction.
In our initial prototype, we had the audience actually learn a dance, the Macarena, from a “choreographer” (myself) in real time, emulating how a dancer would watch a tutorial on the actual app.
Live Prototyping: AI Feedback
We used FaceTime reactions to portray AI giving feedback to the dancer. The camera was pointed to the audience dancing the Macarena as they are experiencing through the dancer point of view. 👍 Thumbs up on the screen meant that AI is telling you that your moves are correct — keep going! Thumbs down meant the AI is detecting wrong movements from your dance.
Facebook Thumbs Up Thumbs Down reaction bubbles.
Live Prototyping: Slido  Commenting
We used Slido to allow for real-time comments to be sent in during the viewing of the completed dance tutorial. It’s meant to emulate the experience of commenting at specific timestamps for feedback in the Groove.
Slido comments on the dance tutorial.
Feedback
We designed a short Google Form to receive feedback on our prototype’s concept and basis for social interactions. Since we had such a large audience, the quantity of feedback was equally immense. We ended up with 3 main feedback points:
😞 Lack of true dancer + choreographer socialization
We didn’t establish a formal relationship between the dancer and choreographer. How can we do that? Can we think of a way to result in an end goal/final performance?
😱 Beginner’s intimidation with global feedback

Beginners in the audience were intimidated by the idea of having strangers comment on the dances they posted — especially if they were still learning it. How can we create a comfortable, negativity-free environment?
🤔 AI feedback: lack of clarity and perceived utility
Some people were confused on exactly how the AI feedback worked. The outlines and arrows were not enough to clearly guide the user to what they should improve. The real-time nature of it also proved to be impractical. How can we improve the AI for clarity and utility?

09

Second Prototype

Based on the feedback we received, we thought of 3 new features/improvements to add:
🎙️ TikTok Studio
TikTok Studios are live dance classes hosted by choreographers. This feature fosters direct social interaction for dancers and choreographers. In the studio class, choreographers have a grid view of students and can pin specific dancers for closer observation, while playing music for the routines. Dancers see the choreographer's video as the main screen, with the option to zoom into their own video for self-analysis.
🕺 Studio Grooves
At the end of a Studio, all the participants’ performances and the choreographer’s’ are recorded and placed in a shared collection, where the choreographer will then “stitch” the videos together into a Studio Groove collection to form a final performance. The choreographer sends out a poll at the end of the Studio, asking if dancers would like to upload their Groove from their Studio’s performance, at a later time, or not at all. This final performance consists of the choreographer’s attempt, as well as everyone who participated in the Studio.
Poll asking dancers permission to use recording for Studio Groove.
‍
Screen of dancer permission poll.
Choreographer collecting dancers’ videos from Studio Groove Collection to post Studio Groove
GIF of screens of a choreographer collecting dancer's videos to put together in a Groove.
Posted DDU-DU DDU-DU Studio Groove 😄
‍
GIF of a completed Studio Groove.
⏯️ Playback mode for AI feedback
This time around, the AI comes in the form of playback and not real-time. This allows for more user-friendly and actually useful feedback, since the AI has more time to process what’s shown in the video and dancers can review their feedback in a more natural way. Dancers can record their take, let AI analyze it, and finally watch the feedback that AI has given them up close.
Screens showing how the playback mode for AI feedback works.
This AI feedback is given before a user even decides to post their attempt.
As we can see, the dancer was successful in her attempt!

10

User Testing: Second Prototype

Once again, we prototyped live in front of a lecture hall audience. We used similar live prototyping methods as in our first session.
From 86 responses to our second feedback form and discussion during our whole class session, we received 4 more feedback points:
🎚️ Scaling / accessibility issues in TikTok Groove
In live studio sessions, users must step back from their devices, hindering visibility of the choreographer's instructions on small screens. How can we virtually overcome this challenge?
👨👧 Dancer-dancer interaction?
We've discussed dancer-audience and dancer-choreographer interactions, but not dancer-to-dancer interaction. How can we address social computing for all groups in TikTok Groove?
💨 What about pacing?
Users pointed out that, in a live class format, it’s difficult to tell when people are falling behind. How might we be able to address pacing issues during a live TikTok Studio?
🙏 Too much demand?
Our first-come, first-serve sign-up system for classes has been criticized as unfair and impractical, given small class sizes and popular choreographers. How can we manage demand for TikTok Studios more effectively?

11

Final Design + Feature Set

🤳 Sharing Videos
Dancers and choreographers are able to share/post dance videos (such as a TikTok Studio class video). Dancers are also able to choose whom they would like to share the video with, publicly for everyone to view, or with a select group of people.
Screens of TikTok Groove on iPhone 15 Pro mockups.
🧠 AI Feedback
After a dancer records themselves dancing, their video can be processed to create a playback mode which includes AI feedback where it’ll highlight and indicate the dancer’s incorrect movements.
📹 TikTok Studio
Choreographers are able to host and record their own classes (aka Studios) with a limited number of students (dancers). Within these classes, dancers can interact with one another in breakout rooms.
👯 Grooves
Dancers are able to create Groove stitches with other users, collaborating with a community of dancers. One type of Groove are Studio Grooves: after a Studio is completed, choreographers are able to post a video sharing the recorded screens of everyone in the Studio, including the choreographer. Dancers also have the option to opt-out or upload their own video at a later time (within a deadline designated by the choreographer).
💬 Direct Messages
This AI feedback is given before a user even decides to post their attempt.
Screenshot of TikTok Groove DMs between dancer and choreographer.
⏱️ Timestamped comments
Viewers can comment, react, and provide feedback at specific timestamps on posted videos.
Screen showing timestamped comments at the time scrubber of a TikTok video.
🗄️ Filter Features
Dancers/viewers are able to filter by dancers, Grooves, and/or different dance styles to make the viewers own specialized feed. This can help in discovering different choreographies and choreographers as well as participating in various Studios.
In addition to the main features above, we improved upon these feature sets:
To address the scalability and accessibility issues, we extended TikTok Groove to other platforms like macOS, where users can utilize Studios with the practicality of a larger screen.
Dancers can answer a poll sent by the choreographer hosting the Studio to give their thoughts on the pacing and difficulty of the class.
We gave the choreographer the ability to send polls to their dancers, asking about their pacing and if they need to slow down.
To address new audiences, we added a Filter feature to the existing TikTok feed to help them discover new, unique Studio Grooves from specific choreographers and/or dance styles.
To address the concern that there might be too much demand for a choreographer’s Studio session, choreographers are able to set a price on their Studios. This improves the previous first-come first-serve style of signing up for classes, and also incentivizes the choreographers as they can now use TikTok Groove as a platform to make money.

12

Reflection

I think the next best step would be to create a comprehensive interaction experience that combines all our features together into one usable prototype. That way, we can really see if our concept can fit the needs of dancers and choreographers in real life. Here's what I learned:
💗 Designing iteratively
I experienced the entire design process of creating a social computing app — from ideation, research, and prototyping. While in the process, we made sure to be creative while also making it logical.
⏱️ Time management is essential
Our team pulled several all-nighters during the course of this project, which could have easily been avoided had we met more during the weeks. Considering our other commitments, however, we did the best we could for this project.
🔔 Finding the balance
During our prototyping phases, I often struggled with prioritizing necessary design details in our UI screens and prototypes.
📝 The value of feedback
No product is perfect, even after multiple rounds of feedback and iteration. But that’s what makes design such an important job.
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