TikTok livestreaming AR

Project Lead, 3D Designer, UX designer, interaction designer, art director

Overview

TikTok livestreaming focuses on real-time social experiences. My role was to redesign AR effects for livestreaming’s social environment to increase livestreaming durations and engagement between hosts and audience.

What I did

  • Developed AR effects to boost social engagement on livestreams.
  • Designed solutions to decrease interaction friction for effects.
  • Led user research, competitor analysis, created 3D designs, and launched 100+ effects.
  • Collaborated with engineering on optimization standards and performance fixes.

Impact

  • +15% on effect usage rate

  • +4% on user livestreaming duration

  • 100+ new livestreaming effects on new pipeline

  • avg 200%+ increase on comments, likes, and gifts from audience

Case Study: Animal Album Effect

Background and Research

Problem:

The goal of livestreaming effects is to help build better engagement between hosts and audiences and increase the streaming duration. Current effects on LIVE are migrated from the For You Page (FYP), which focus on individual user content and aren’t designed for multi-host social environments.

User Research:

To get better context on our problem, we partnered with the PM team to understand user behavior on LIVE and any pain points with using migrated FYP effects

Design Solutions Breakdown

Thematic Album Effect

We hypothesized a thematic album effect would help increase livestreaming duration. An album is a collection of multiple effects that can be accessed through a single effect thumbnail. Having thematic roles under a single effect album gives hosts a sense of community when using the effect together. These characters share the same visual identity and design language.

Normal effects are not visually or physically connected to each

Album collects themed effects under one entrypoint

Feel a sense of inclusion to use the same collection of thematic effects

Full-body Interactions

1. Increase host audience bonding through play

  • Since 90% of livestream phones are stationary, we used full-body interactions to create a fun atmosphere and better bond hosts and audiences.

  • I made prototypes with stand-ins which allowed me to experiment with AR interactions and finish3d asset production in parallel.

    • interaction prototype

    visual scripting

    final interation

    2. Interaction design guidelines

    User's real-world units are drastically different from the engine space units. I created several movement range guidelines for mapping real-world rotation and position units into digital space, decreasing the friction of effort from users and improving our pipeline efficiency

    users' movement are remapped to a smaller range to ensure they stay within the camera screen

    Results and Impact

  • Animal albums contributed to increased user livestreaming duration by 4%
  • On average, comments, views, and likes on livestreams increased by over 200%.
  • Animal Series was one of the most popular live streaming effects to date
  • Users built communities from animal album and received physical gifts from fans.

    • A user interacted with her audience purely through animal album

    This user built her entire account through animal album and gained a huge community

    3D Visuals