Episode 54 highlights – Mary Formanek podcast about UX Deceptive Patterns and Being a UX’r on TikTok:

• How Mary got started on Tik Tok and began sharing UX knowledge there
• Deceptive UX patterns, what they are and how to avoid them
• Consent and interaction design to avoid building in deceptive design patterns
• Examples from popular sites that use deceptive UX patterns

Links from this episode:

• https://www.darkpatterns.org/types-of-dark-pattern
• https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/03/us/politics/trump-donations.html
• https://www.tiktok.com/@uxwithmary?lang=en
• https://www.darkpatterns.org/

Episode Transcript

(this transcript was automatically created using our very own transcription feature in Aurelius and has been minimally edited, please excuse any typos or weirdness 😀 )

Hey Mary. Hi, how’s it going? Good. How are you? Not bad. Busy. Start to the week already were recording on a Monday. Not that. That matters too much because people are going to listen to this the various different points, and it’s going to be sort of, you know, released after that. But busy start to the week. So but can’t complain. It’s always good. It’s always good to be busy. Yes. I like being busy in the right ways, though, that makes sense. Right? Everybody has their own definition of that.

Anyway, I appreciate you jumping on taking the time to be a guest on our show and kind of chat about stuff. I would be great if you could introduce yourself, talk a little bit about, you know, who you are, what you do, what you’re passionate about stuff like that. So people can kind of get a sense for who you are if they weren’t. Don’t already know who you are. Yeah, okay, so I’m Mary for monic. I’m a senior ux designer and I also have a tick tock that is kind of viral. It’s ux with Mary where I go and I talk,

Talk and talk about ux kind of principles and best practices and answer any questions that people might have just kind of introduce the industry to people that might not know about ux. That’s pretty much The quick summary of me. Yeah. You know, and that’s something that you and I kind of chatted about before we ever actually got on the podcast because I if you would have asked me

Where do you find, you know, what, ux information, or people sharing content about that stuff. I think TikTok would have been the last or never an answer for me. Also, I was very surprised to hear that you had such a big following. You were sharing a lot of this stuff and you were saying it. A lot of people really, really interested about that. I mean, how, how did that happen for you? Yeah. So I was on Tick, Tock at the beginning of the pandemic, and I started seeing other people talking about their professions and what they,

Are passionate about and teaching other people. And I found myself learning so much from TikTok and I did a little intro video on my personal TikTok about, you know what, my major was and a lot of people are like, what is that? I don’t understand. How do I get into that? Can you tell us more? And so I decided or dedicate an entire account to ux. And so I started ux with Mary and I just kind of went from there, talking about what you access, the basic principles one of

More popular things that I do is review websites for dark ux patterns. A lot of people didn’t really understand what dark ux was. So, I went into a hole deep dive into what that was. And so, when I’m talking about websites that are, you know, displaying dark ux practices, then they understand why. So, that’s kind of the gist of what I do on there and how I got started. But yeah, it I learned so much from TikTok. I follow so many creators that are telling me

You know what to invest in the stock market, or how to, you know, build things in my house correctly and how to file my taxes in a better way. You know, just so much information that you’d never think to find on an app that was originally really popular because of dance Trends. But yeah, exactly. And that’s and I think that that’s why it was so surprising for me personally and it’s because I suppose, you know, I wasn’t in the target audience of the original intention for that app. For sure is I don’t

If I dance well and I’m not interested in watching others. That’s what to remind me that I’m not dancing well and so that was so fascinating for me to hear that there was like so much education kind of happening there and a couple things as you described that I want to dig into, but the first question I had really is, do you find that most of the following you have there are ux people? Or are they people interested in ux or is it or is it a mix and how would you break that down? Yeah, I’d say only maybe

Eighteen percent of my followers are in the industry and a couple of them have their own ux Pages as well. But I found that I’m the only one that kind of focuses primarily on ux, which is interesting because a lot of people are just trying to get followers and likes and that’s when you start veering towards other topics and such. But so only about 15%, like I said, a lot of people are just kind of curious about the industry but not want to get into it and the other half.

That are people that are like, how do I get into this? I have an interview next week. Can you help me out? I had someone ask me in a comment the other day. Can you help me figure out stuff about ux copywriting? And, you know, I have an interview for that as well. And how do I negotiate salaries for ux copywriting? And so it’s a lot of, I think, 50/50 for the most part, except for that 15%, and I’m really bad at math. But like, it’s like,

People are just like interested in ux and the other half are people that are trying to get into the industry. So yeah, yeah, that’s in really kind of runs the gamut to on what people are interested in. I mean, it’s not it’s not hard, core researchers, or hardcore you I type folks, it’s you mentioned, ux copywriting which is not. It’s pretty specific niche of all. Yeah, part of the world, I feel like right. Yeah. So those are things that you know, there’s I don’t know everything I do.

Out of classes on my own. I do a lot of research and I’m constantly reading books on ux, but I get comments like that a lot. And I have to go in and do my own research, to try to help my followers and so I learn a lot to by doing these TikToks as well having to do all the research to help them. That’s really interesting. I mean you sound a lot like an educator to me like when you when you ask somebody why they chose a specific career path or what they do certain things, I mean it really sounds to me like it’s awesome too.

By the way that you’re getting something out of this, you’re not just sharing stuff. It’s like, oh well. I get the opportunity to learn more about this too, then kind of share it back out, I think that that’s pretty, right? Yeah. And I actually I try to write medium articles with my Tick Tock so that you can go into more depth or I can go into more depth on the topic and that they can, you know, learn more about it that I can’t fit in a one minute video or multiple one minute videos and when I’m writing these articles I feel like

That’s when I put in what I’ve learned from doing all the research right now. I’m doing an article on ux and empathy, and why empathy is so important to having a good ux design, but I didn’t even think about that topic. Until I started reading the comments. Underneath one of The TikTok videos that I posted about dark ux patterns, and people were saying, oh, like they deserve to be tricked, and I realized that

If you were thinking that as a ux designer, then you’re going to be making really bad products for everyone. So it’s really interesting to hear and also perfect segue into something else. I wanted to ask you about because you said kind of your thing and your passion is talking about dark patterns and you do a lot of that on Tick Tock as well as others talk to me a little bit more about that because I’ve actually already seen some of your articles and things like that. But, you know, how did that come about and how to dark patterns, really become sort of an interest for you.

Yeah, so I’ve always been interested in dark patterns. I didn’t realize that there was dark patterns until I think. I stumbled upon another medium article. And I was like, I didn’t know these were real, I never was taught about bees and all my ux education and then what happened, which got the whole ball. Rolling on take, talk with dark ux was I decided to go on Trump’s website, just to go give it like a general ux evaluation and see what was going on.

And I found so many dark ux patterns that I felt like I needed to create a PSA to help people not get scammed and that’s what kind of blew up the dark ux kind of series on my tic toc page. After that, I started doing other evaluations on e-commerce and other politicians like, Joe Biden and AOC. So there’s a lot of differences in there. It’s really interesting.

To see what people are using dark, ux patterns, and just kind of bring that out to the public. And so, after doing the evaluations, and kind of doing a general overview of what, their QX is, I started doing individual videos about each of the twelve, dark ux patterns, and sorry about that. And then after that, I started getting a lot of comments from people that were like,

Like I didn’t know about this. How can I help myself? What can I do to avoid these patterns and not get tricked? Myself and so I started in the videos leaving little tricks for people that are not designing as ux designer. We need to know that these are dark patterns and not do them, but if you are just someone perusing the internet you want to know how to avoid them and that’s where that 50-50 comes into play of my audience.

Really interesting, so it’s not just people in ux saying, I want to learn more about that too, may be avoided or call it out with somebody else suggesting it. But hey, I’m a person who uses the internet and you just kind of show me something that I want to be aware of, as sort of a consumer or yeah, or whatever that case, maybe you could set back to just in the event, people are listening that maybe don’t know exactly what a dark pattern is. Can you kind of add your definition of what is a dark pattern and ux? Yeah. So a dark pattern is

Let’s see. I mean, there’s a

Later on. So I dark modern is like a pattern that you put into an interaction that creates a malicious result and you’re doing it with a malicious intent. So you’re not doing it on accident. You didn’t accidentally make a check box automatically check to have Auto paying you know donations every month you knew you were doing this thing, that was bad and you did it anyway. That’s

Arc pattern. Anything that kind of tricks user into doing something that they don’t want to do, like, spamming all their friends with emails and, you know, having things in their shopping cart that they didn’t expect or being stuck into a subscription that they didn’t know that they couldn’t get out of things like that that have, you know, dark intentions and I mean, malicious outcomes is what

I would describe a dark ux pattern has. Yeah, that makes sense. You based on what you were saying. It was just kind of trying to re summarize What I Hear two years maybe. Well I think what you’re what you’re saying is a dark pattern for you is definitely something eliciting, some kind of behavior that either somebody didn’t know like they were unaware was happening, or could actually be detrimental or bad for them without them opting into it. I think opting into it is probably true.

Giving consent for something kind of something that you’re describing. Yeah, and I feel like that is the most. Common ux thing is not be are not giving your consent that it’s automatically consented and that’s how the majority of these problems happen.

That’s really interesting. And so you mentioned, did you say 12 dark ux patterns, was your like a list? Yes, there is so hairy, brignall, created this list back in. I want to say 2005 and he has a whole website with all of the descriptions and examples as well that you can look on. That is really insightful but he goes through each of the dark patterns and explains what they each do.

So right now, I think I’m on number four or five on my Tick Tock page. So we haven’t gone through all of them yet. Okay. So you’re actually, you’re going to do a specific piece on every single one. Yes. Interesting. Okay. So let’s go back to number one and maybe have some you know like the ones that you’ve talked about already because you said that you reviewed a handful of sites. Yeah talked about some of the dark patterns. What’s one? That you see all the time or maybe one that you already covered that? You could share you know some more details.

About. Yeah. So

This is called roach motel, and it’s pretty much where you can’t get out of a subscription eat or easily. So Amazon is the most known or well-known company for this. When you’re trying to get out of a Prime Membership, it’s like going through the seven rings of hell. You just keep going forever and ever and ever and you can’t get out of it and they try to give you all these incentives. And I believe it’s like a 15-page opt out

Process. And I did a video on it. It’s not fun, but there’s a lot of other people that are companies that are doing that as well. I also pointed out Geico in that one where you go through their entire process on their website, to try to cancel your membership with them and then you end up having to call them in the very end. So you wouldn’t do that whole thing for no reason. So I feel like that is the most common one that I see. And it’s also the most accepted one, the other one that I see a lot.

Lot is sneak in the basket where you are like, consenting to doing something because it’s Auto selected and you think that’s a terms and conditions button but it’s actually saying, oh, well, you know, you’re also buying a magazine subscription and you didn’t realize it because we just kind of gray our glaze over it. We’re not really thinking about the terms and conditions because we see it everywhere. So if it’s in that same section, people just ignore it.

Okay, interesting. Now that first one I think you cut out a little bit but you were saying that one’s cockroach motel and it’s the summary I heard from you is really just adding a bunch of friction in in the ability to cancel or end a service or subscription or something like that. Is that fair? Yeah. Sorry about that. Yeah. No. It’s just like a multi. It’s almost impossible to get out of a subscription.

That’s really interesting. Okay, so talk to me a little because you said sort of the first place you did this. You started looking at politicians websites and you said, you mentioned, you went to Trump’s website and that one actually kind of took off. You had an article that really got like syndicated and a lot of attention about that. Yeah. Can you summarize that for folks like what you saw there and what you were what was going on? And how you know why, why those were dark patterns and in what you saw? Yeah, I mean there were so many

Dark patterns that it kind of blew my mind. This really bad usability and a lot of dike are dark psychology. I’m sorry, I hope you take all my stumbling out, but all my dirt are a lot of dark psychology, because there was a lot of colors being used that really made your heart rate so up and make you have a feeling that you shouldn’t be having when giving a donation. So when entering his website and he changed it every week or his

Branding team did every week you would immediately get a pop up in this pop-up give you no indication that you could get out of it. So you would have to either click the button that said go to donate or you would have to click somewhere around there and hope to get out because there was no visible Acts or close out of that pop up. And then once you got on to this page it was just like– a psychology overload. It was the photos were dark. There were black and white. It had Trump making direct eye contact.

Contact and pointing at you which is like that’s, you know, you’re kind of threatening the person when you’re making direct eye contact and a photo on your pointing and you’re not smiling that this makes people feel really uncomfortable even if it’s a photograph. Hmm. And then on top of that everything, the text on top was bright red and in all caps and it was pretty much threatening his base that you had to donate. And then after that, you’d go through this hole.

Process. It was Auto selected that you were going to be donating at thousand dollars. And then on top of that, you’re going to be donating that monthly and then after that there was another like donation option that opted in as well. So, there are three donations on top of that, and you had to really navigate that and through the all the text, it was a lot of manipulated text that was like you have to do this or else, you won’t be his friend, and you don’t want to be his enemy like really

If you live taxed. And then I think the worst part, I mean, the auto donations really robbed a lot of people recently. The New York Times released an article on this exact same thing. They’re a little late to the party because you know, we posted about this and talked about this and July of last year, but they just posted it with all of the stats of the people that were actually going broke because they didn’t realize they were donating.

Um, so much money. They couldn’t pay their rent, they couldn’t buy groceries. So that’s like really up there on how dark it was. But the second thing that really made me cringe was that I went over this site with a screen reader and the screen reader, never indicated. That anything was checked and when you hovered over the total at the bottom it didn’t say that you were donating monthly and it didn’t give the full total. And so for someone that was using a

Reader, someone that’s visually impaired, that’s even that’s worse. And as a politician, your site needs to be Ada approved. And that’s one of the things that I just, I couldn’t deal with. At that point, I had to make a 3 Series video in one video, just dedicated the screen reader. That’s actually very, very surprising to hear. Yeah. Because in that case, that’s actually a

Legal like you, you can. Yeah, there’s legal ramifications to not being

You know, accessible under certain level of compliance. I don’t know what specific are for politicians particularly, but I do know as a person who builds the internet, you just light has to be accessible to a certain degree to a certain certification and I guess that was kind of. My question is, if some of those things that you hear. I mean obviously those are

Unethical would be even a soft way of sort of saying that, but are there, you know, with some of these dark patterns, have you found? You know, people people actually reporting this and then have you ever found anybody talking about this as well? We got in trouble for this or, you know, there were there were that wasn’t legal action taken. Was there ever anything like that? Yeah, so right now, the Trump Administration has multiple lawsuits about their website. They oh, I think the New York Times.

Said they owed somewhere between like 50 million dollars in refunds. And then, on top of that, like, I mean, going away from just that dark deep dark ux pattern and the Trump site in general, a lot of dark ux patterns are illegal in other countries, but they’re completely legal in the United States. The only thing that Trump really got away with are not away with, but the only thing that was illegal was the Ada thing. I don’t know if anyone has filed a suit about

The ADA compliance but LinkedIn had an issue. They have words. They were using a dark pattern called friends. Damn friends scam. Yeah and pretty much it was you put in your email address and they got access to your entire book of emails pretty much and they were spamming all of these people’s friends telling them that they have to join LinkedIn on a weekly basis.

They went to court for that and they, you know, there was some sort of lawsuit and they got in trouble and they can’t do it anymore. So that’s the only dark pattern that I’ve really heard of having a legal action that made someone immediately stop the action. But I’m hoping as you know, a lot of the dark patterns are being more revealed that we can maybe have laws as well as the other countries around the world that will prevent this in the future.

ER, so, yeah, I mean, that’s very surprising. It sounds like a lot of this comes down to personal accountability, which is not always the most reliable, I guess. You know, I would have a couple questions that came out of this. Yeah, first of all, with some of these that you call out being that some of your audience are not necessarily designers or even people who make digital products. But rather somebody who may have experienced this, have you ever had anybody comment on this or reach out to you and say you know that site you reviewed I experienced that

Had this happened to me. Yeah, I actually had someone comment that said, that his grandmother lost 5K to Trump and he had to go through all of her bank accounts and try to get it all set up. And when I got that comment, the first thing I did because I have some Republican family members was go to all of my Republican, family members and ask them if they donated and I’m like, you can do what you want with your money, but I just want to make sure that you’re not getting robbed. So, yeah, we, I

I’d have a couple comments that were saying that they or a family member had gotten into that Web of Lies, I guess. And just had a lot more in donations automatically taken out that they were not aware that they were giving, right? And it’s your right to go or give a donation, but it’s not right to have that donation taken from you monthly without your permission. So that’s where I feel like a lot of people in the comment section that are saying negative things.

About it. Don’t understand like you know if you want to donate $500 to Trump, go ahead and do it, but that doesn’t mean it should be every month so that they can’t buy groceries.

Yeah. No. You know, I guess with that one. You just kind of very interested in this. Now, I’m my question. There, was there a way to even stop it. Could you, could you cancel that at any point?

I don’t know specifically because I never gave a donation. And so I assumed that they might have been getting emails where they could have, you know, clicked out of it. I’m so sorry. My boyfriend just got home, but I personally do not know of any link or any way that people were able to get out because I never tested that I’m assuming since the Trump Administration or Trump

Not Administration the Trump Campaign Committee owe so much money to all these people. And it’s a documented amount that would in the lawsuit it would say, or these people already asked for a refund somehow. Yeah. That’s absolutely crazy. Getting back to the one thing that I was sort of realizing as you were talking about, this is, we don’t have a whole lot of, you know, legally binding things.

You from doing this, it kind of comes down to personal accountability. Yep. Question, I would have for you, you know, I have to believe people listening to this show which are people in ux and product and such. What advice would you give to somebody to avoid this, you know, in a position like ours, as somebody who’s in ux? Yeah, will be really well-versed on the 12. Dark ux patterns like really study them. And then from an ethical background, in an embassy background, we should know that we should not be doing.

S. And I did do a video on how dark ux is kind of created. And usually it comes from upper management business to try to make more money or the marketing team. And what we really have to do as a ux designer is really push back when the marketing team is saying, like, oh well, let’s just, you know, send them all these emails that they don’t want. We have the obligation as a ux designer to be defending our users and saying, no, we are not going to be doing that. And this is why.

So really my advice is again you know, study up on the 12 patterns and then really go out there and fight for the users. You know, that’s our job. So we just gotta extend it a little further.

Yeah, that’s interesting. One of the things that kind of came in, to my mind, as you were describing, this is, this is a place where doing research regularly with the people you’re designing for and being able to bring back actual quotes actual data and say, this is how people are reacting to this and allowing that to be, you know, sort of seen and heard and understood by the rest of your team. That could, I mean, I would imagine that could help build that in both e in some way. But then also help get the point across that

You know what you’re doing here, isn’t just a matter of ticking a box and making more money. This is really affect people’s lives. Yeah, absolutely. And I feel like that is kind of, you know what, ux is brought into our industry of design, you know, back in the day website design, which is making something really pretty and ux is really caring about the people and the users. And this is our responsibility as an industry to bring in more empathy, and more care about our customers. And the people that are using what we’re creating

Yeah, for sure, you know, I’m curious to what, what sort of questions do you get asked most often given you have just such a sort of diverse following, you know, in the places that you are sharing content, I want very curious to hear, what sort of questions you get asked most often. And if are there any similarities between people who work in the field and those who don’t? Yeah, people that work in the field. Want to know about emerging technology? They want to know about a RV r, + XR design.

And how to do it. Correctly people that are trying to get into it. I actually get these comments. The most are, how do I prepare Market portfolio? How do I get into ux? I’m from this industry. How do I transition? What are the best courses to go to? What are the best books to read? Those are the majority of the comments that I get. As far as content creation, I get a lot of comments from people that are not in, just the industry that are

It’s very curious and I like, are they want to know more? So they want to ask more about the series. They want to know how many more videos are coming. How many dark ux patterns there are and other interesting things about ux, the other thing that I do get a lot when I was doing the reviews on websites, I had a lot of people putting in submissions, so I had a list at one point about 50 different websites that people.

Want me to go and review. I actually had to make a different email address because a lot of these sites were really scammy. I did one for a jewelry store and they’re still sending me emails that I must have unsubscribed, at least 20 times, so I do get a lot of suggestions on videos for reviews, but for the most part, it really depends on what the audience is asking for. So that’s kind of the range, that’s really funny and I guess I should have expected.

That where people say oh do this one now. Try this one. Is there is there like a most common requested one or this is kind of all over the board? Um I’ve gotten some weird ones, I’ve gotten a lot of sites from Florida. I’ve gotten a lot of politicians, I’ve got many requests for Ted Cruz’s site and the Florida unemployment site, which is interesting.

But not really anything more consistent besides the state and politicians? Yeah. Interesting. So when you do this, when you are going to review a site and you’re going to try to review it for any dark patterns and things like that is there a particular process you sort of Step through or you know what I mean? Like how I like how you go about? This is the same every time. Yeah. So what I start to do is I really pretend like I am a user and most of these sites I’ve never been to anyway so I just try to navigate

The site, as if I would be, if I was looking for something in particular, and as I’m going through that process and the kind of being navigated by the site itself, then from there, it kind of Branch out and be like, okay, what else can I do on this site? Until I find all the patterns, I do try to let, usually, when I make these videos are about 30 minutes long, but having a 30 minute video on Tick, Tock is impossible. So, I try to do a full video and upload it to my

Tube. And then just take like the key points and put that on TikTok. So that’s kind of how that goes. Got it, got it. Cool. Well you know, you work in the industry and so aside from this which seems like obviously just even a personal passion and hobby or side hustle or whatever you would want to call it. How has you know, doing this affected? You know, your work at the company you work for like, you know, in industry.

Yeah, I’m really fortunate. My current company is super supportive. They actually saw my tic tocs before they hired me and they’re like, oh well she really knows what she’s talking about. So you know, we have no doubt that she can do her job correctly. So that was fantastic to have that support coming into a new position. But what I do find is things that I’m working on in my day or daily life and my job, it gets me inspired to do other videos. If I’m talking

to a co-worker and I’m explaining why we’re doing something I’m like, oh, I should do a video on that or I should write an article on that. So that’s kind of how it kind of all ties together, okay, so one one sort of feeds the other and then it just it’s just a cycle you know there’s yeah experiencing in your like day-to-day professional life so to speak at your day job quote unquote which then make you want to share some other things right right. It’s a lot of other people met with articles and things like that and then vice versa there’s things that you’re learning and you’re hearing from this

B Tech talk and comments, where you go, you can bring this back to your team at your quote-unquote day job. And say yeah, we should probably be thinking about this. It wasn’t something that we considered before. Yep. Yeah absolutely. It’s just one giant circle of education and knowledge.

That’s really that’s kind of really cool to that. They saw your Tick Tock and was like well we like that we want to hire you because we saw this that you were doing, you know, it was really cool because we think it’s a very non-traditional way of being able to show some your credentials. Yeah, it was honestly very shocking to me. I was kind of hoping that they wouldn’t find it because you know there was a lot of negativity about TikTok at the time. A lot of people were like, oh, you know, we can’t trust this platform.

My last company, even send out an email and said that if you had to talk on your phone, you had to delete it. And so going into a company that’s like this is awesome. Keep doing. It was fantastic. Yeah. It sounds like a pretty big change then from from where you were before. Yeah, I am curious. Do you see

You know, as somebody who’s contributing on that platform a lot, do you anticipate that the topic of ux will grow, stay the same or decline on TikTok? I can already see it growing. I actually took a Hiatus for a couple months because I moved States. And when I came back, I started getting a lot of people that were liking. My content that also had ux TikTok accounts. So, when I first started, there were maybe five of us.

And now there’s I don’t know how many and you know probably hundreds of ux accounts and a lot of people very interested in the topic which is fantastic and I really hope that it will expand our industry with that demand. Yeah, I mean, I think that there’s a lot of a lot of platforms that kind of pop up and over the years initially, you would say there’s this isn’t really even the place to talk about this, you know, X Y, she doesn’t matter if it’s ux or anything else and then all the sudden, it just becomes another social space.

And that is like common, right? And so you already start. Yes pattern. It sounds like. Yeah, absolutely. Well, it’s certainly all new to me and I appreciate being able to talk to somebody who is kind of, you know, knee-deep in it and seeing that happen because it’s really interesting to see new technologies and new spaces like this being used in a way that you didn’t expect, and they have the ability to learn about that. Oh, yeah, it’s fantastic. And I feel like, I mean, I don’t work for TikTok, but I would recommend it to

You want to because I’ve learned so much on the platform that I never knew before. I recently just saw a video about healthy shampoo and I just threw out all my shampoo and bought new ones but I didn’t know about that before. So you know I’m constantly learning new things on the platform as well as I’m hoping that I’m teaching people new things as well. Yeah, it almost sounds like this. This interesting sort of crowd crowd sourcing or democratization of

Information and knowledge, where, you know, you don’t have to be this sort of controlled source and what you share will depend on, you know, whose fault who’s footing the bill and that kind of thing is just like, very, very organic. Yeah. It is in the algorithm is fantastic. Like, after a few weeks, they kind of really figure you out after what your liking and what you are viewing constantly. And they really tailor your content in a way that you’re only seeing things that you want to see. I

To compare it to like a more personalized YouTube, which shorter videos and the for you page, is constantly giving you new videos and new Traders and new information. So, you’re not seeing just the people that you’re following, which I think is kind of what YouTube does and what Instagram does and Facebook. So you’re not stuck with those people. You are learning new things that you never thought about before and it’s being, you know, tailored to you by the algorithm

That said well you like you know dog videos you might like shampoo videos slang so interesting. I got to ask a super meta question then it on Tick Tock so I have no bias or anything with this but I gotta ask as somebody who’s reviewing other sites and products for their ux and dark patterns. What do you think of TikToks ux

I think it’s great actually. They use Fitts law really well. So when you’re holding your phone, because it’s really a phone app, all the buttons are in this kind of like, L shape in the bottom, so you can easily navigate between them. And then if you really want to like, get out of your comfort zone, then you have to go out of that fits law area and go to the top of the page. But besides that it’s pretty clear. They have recently added a lot of kind of 88 Things based off of

Of users that were asking for it. So now they have auto-generated captions because a lot of people were reading or not reading but like listening to The TikTok set night and they don’t want the volume on and bless. It’s better for people that can’t hear. Anyway, so that’s been fantastic. The one thing that I’m not a big fan of is they don’t label all their icons and that’s something that is one of my biggest pet peeves in any ux design. So besides that user experience is

Really easy to navigate, super simple to use and very comfortable and you can definitely get stuck in there for a while because of it. Hmm, interesting. So yeah, you do you Exxon TikTok maybe you should do a ux of TikTok on TikTok. Maybe that’s it.

Well, you know, Mary I really appreciate you coming on to chat about all this stuff. I’ve certainly learned some things that I had no idea about particularly TikTok in the community is there and sort of in what people are interested in on that. But I got to be respectful of your time. One of the things I like to do is, you know, sort of towards the end of every episode, ask somebody. If I were to forget everything we talked about and somebody came to you and said, what was that about? What was that podcast about? How would you summarize it for folks listening? Yeah, I will.

And summarize it as TikTok is an amazing place to learn ux things enough. Yeah. You know, is there anything that you want to share with folks that we didn’t get a chance to talk about today? No, not really. I mean, we went over, you know, my account and where you can get more information on medium. So I mean that’s it I guess if I don’t know if I plugged in my handle but it’s a ux with Mary

On TikTok, so got it. Okay. What can patients have a link to that on the show notes? Where where you can find this episode? Of course, although I don’t know how useful that will be for you. It’s a phone app anyway, so, you know, get that link out. Maybe go on your your phone. And then you’ll be able to find you’ll be able to find Mary on tick. Talk about all the ux stuff. She’s talked about

Yeah, sounds awesome. All right, well I just want to say thanks again for coming on and sharing this. Brand-new perspective with me, I have to believe that, not everybody listening to our show has been on Tick, Tock looking for ux, and so now they know that the again. Yeah, thank you for having me. Awesome. Alright, we’ll see you next time and thanks.