Reducing TikTok Burnout to Boost User Retention
Reducing burnout through mindful nudges, without killing engagement
📈 100% would adopt feature
👍 80% found habit quanitification helpful
💪 Users felt more in control of their choices
🧠 Designed for TikTok's business model
My Role
Sole Product Designer
(Redesign Project)
Timeframe
12 Weeks
Skills
Brand Research
User Journey
Feature Analysis
Prototyping
Problem Overview
Burnout, Guilt, and Regret
“TikTok is so addicting. You just keep swiping and you don’t know what the time is”
Roland - averages 3h daily
TikTok makes up over 40% of the short-form video market, but it faces criticisms over its addictive design and impact on mental health. Users often feel guilt, burnout, or regret when scrolling for too long.
On the other hand, competitors like IG Reels and YT Shorts (20% market share each), receive much less criticism. This gap presents a unique opportunity: What if TikTok could deepen its market lead by genuinely addressing addiction concerns while maintaining engagement?
The business challenge: supporting user mental health without sacrificing time spent on the platform.
Solution
I built a wellness system that allows users to scroll more mindfully
Helps users track behavior to improve autonomy
Supports breaks to improve well-being
Promotes more genuine wellness features to improve brand perception
Balances user and business value with a minimally intrusive experience
Research & Insights
The psychology behind scrolling too much
TikTok takes advantage of three core psychological weaknesses in users: time distortion, FOMO (fear of missing out), and social comparison. I wanted to see how real users struggle with these patterns.
User Research
Research shows that male students (18-25) experienced higher depression and anxiety from excessive social media use. I interviewed 5 participants in this demographic to validate these findings with TikTok consumption. Here's what I found:
100%
experienced regret after long scrolling sessions
80%
lost track of time while scrolling
40%
tried setting limits but found them ineffective
"TikTok is both negative, but also inspirational"
Dustin - averages 2.6h daily
This love-hate relationship is why users struggle to manage their own well-being. Since users still love using the app, the design opportunity is to intervene with support, not with restriction.
Dissecting the user flow
Mapping out a typical binging session revealed a key moment. As users watch TikTok after TikTok, they bounce between joy, sadness, anger, etc. This leaves them feeling emotionally drained, even if they aren't aware of it themselves.
Users subconsciously crave the next dopamine hit, so they don't know when to stop. Being able to interrupt these peak emotional exhaustions with calming experiences can help reset the user and encourage mindfulness.
Users stuck in an emotional rollercoaster that drains them
Why current features fail
Current well-being features share two problems:
Easily Dismissible: Skipping becomes reflex
Too Abrupt: Users feel punished, not supported
Popup Dialog
Reminder popup to take a break after 'x' minutes
Why it fails
Abrupt
One tap to skip
Presented like a popup ad
"Take a Break" Video
Randomly interrupts feed to remind users to take a break
Why it fails
Not calming
One swipe to skip
Presented like sponsored content
Screen Time Lock
Locks the app with a passcode after 'x' minutes
Why it fails
Very abrupt and jarring
Feels punishing (reduces autonomy)
Fun Fact: TikTok launched a global health campaign called the Mental Health Awareness campaign in Oct 2023.While it provided more resources, they are hidden in the settings and hard to digest.
TikTok claims to care for mental health, but these features feel more like fake empathy. There's a huge opportunity to design more effective features that genuinely support the users.
Core Challenge
How might we create features that feel supportive, not disingenuous?
TikTok benefits from its addictive design. The more time users spend on TikTok, the more the platform profits. The design challenge was creating interventions that users would want to engage with, rather than reflexively dismiss.
I had to work with unique constraints:
Preserve user engagement
Balance between user and business value to uphold profit
Avoid too much friction
Solution
A wellness system that allows users to scroll more mindfully
I created a system consisting of 4 features that follows 2 core strategies: Building Awareness, and Supporting Breaks. It gives users the awareness to make conscious choices without being too disruptive to the overall experience.
Building Awareness
Helping track behavior so users feel in control, not blind-sided.
Features: Swipe Counter, Screen time Hub
Supporting Breaks
Interrupting the flow gently so users can reset
Features: Breathing Exercise, Usage Summary
A system that quantifies usage and encourages breaks
Design Decisions
Strategy 1: Building awareness by tracking behavior
There are 2 features to track user behavior and help improve visibility of habits: swipe counter and screentime hub.
Swipe Counter
In early iterations, I tracked user behavior by time and videos watched, and used sad emojis to encourage breaks when they watched for too long. However, this felt punishing and amplified the guilt that users already experienced.
Instead, I shifted to counting swipes. Swipes directly represent user behavior, as opposed to the time passed. When users see a time counter, it feels like the app is limiting them. But when they see swipes, they feel in control. Every swipe is a conscious choice, making the limit feel self-imposed rather than enforced.
Before: Stats were guilt-driven | After: Stats were autonomy driven
Screentime Hub
Screen time stats are currently hidden in the settings, making it hard for users to find. By anchoring the screentime hub to the swipe counter, users can access their data very conveniently.
TikTok's weekly graph is retrospective. It shows what already happened, but offers little actionable value for the current day. So, I added another graph to show daily stats with a daily average line. This turns passive data into an active benchmark that users can compare against.
Daily graph avoids progress bar design to prevent users from completing the 'target'
Strategy 2: Supporting breaks to interrupt flow
Guided breathing videos and usage summary help break the flow of the user, calming them down and allowing them to make conscious decisions on whether or not to continue.
Guided Breathing Videos
Users are emotionally exhausted when they consume many videos. So, when they reach 100 swipes, a guided breathing video plays to reset their mental state and allow them to take a breath.
The 100 swipe limit helps users feel like they've completed a session, so they're more willing to take a break.
This also opens up opportunities for brand and businesses partnerships to create their own calming videos, similar to those by Headspace, bringing business value back into the system.
Video lasts 20 seconds, following the 4-7-8 breathing technique to calm anxiety
Usage Summary
Users feel regret because they aren't aware of their own swiping habits. They lose track of time, swipe mindlessly, and overall feel out of control.
After calming users down with the breathing video, the 'Usage Summary' shows users their usage. This lets users feel more in control to make informed decisions, and gives them an opportunity to quit if they want.
Interrupt flow to allow users to make a conscious decision
Impact and Results
Creating a healthier relationship with TikTok
To validate my design, I asked the same five interview participants to give feedback about the new feature. Here's what I learned:
Validation Results
100% said they would adopt the feature
80% found quantifying their habits helpful
Users felt more in control of their choices
Users reported feeling "safer" using TikTok
The features successfully made users more conscious of their behavior without feeling disingenuous.
If rolled out as a live feature, here's how I would test at scale
I would conduct A/B testing with small user groups, based on age and usage patterns (light vs heavy users), and test these metrics:
Effectiveness: % of users who take a break and don't immediately return
Feature Adoption: % of users who keep the feature on after 30 days
Business Impact: Changes in daily active users and session length
User Satisfaction: User reviews and survey scores
Though the initial feedback was positive, real world data would show if the feature is actually effective in improving user habits without sacrificing engagement.
Beyond metrics, the plugin solved real usability pain points:
Users gain autonomy through quantified habits, break videos, and goal setting
Business gains improved perception by offering genuine wellness features
TikTok gains a new revenue model through sponsored relaxing videos
Subtle and optional implementation retains flexibility for a minimally intrusive experience
😀 "I feel like this would help me a lot with my binge sessions"
Kobe - averages 3h daily
Reflection
What worked
Having users work toward a swipe limit proved to be really effective. It gives them a goal to work towards and chunks their time into "sessions" that can be quit. Quantifying their habits also makes it easy to understand. It addresses the bulk of user pain points in a minimally intrusive way.
The breathing videos is a perfect opportunity to bring back business value to the features to balance both user and business needs. Without it, the features would lean too heavily towards the users, and it would be an unrealistic implementation.
What I'd do differently
I conducted surveys at the beginning to measure the relationship between TikTok usage and their perceived well-being. However, I didn't create proper structure to the survey and ended up gaining little insights. Had I been more intentional with the data I was collecting, I could've had meaningful, quantitative metrics to support my problem statement.
Studying more about how to navigate mental health spaces with users. Although I knew that opening users up about their mental health would be difficult, it was harder than I expected. Sometimes I would make users feel uncomfortable, or I could tell they were being defensive with their answers. Next time, I would ask more open ended questions and ease them into difficult questions.
Key learnings
Navigating mental health requires care and trust.
Some people are not easy to open up about something so personal, and it's important to make them feel safe.
Set clear objectives with each step
Being intentional with each design exercise (e.g. surveys) would create more impactful insights.
Be realistic in your solutions
You can't just focus on prioritizing users. In the real world, business value also needs to be equally considered.
What's next
Monitoring long-term effectiveness
The main goals for the next steps is gathering real data user feedback. However, since I don't have access to roll-out features on the real app, so here is what I can do:
Usability Testing: Gather feedback from 5-10 users with different usage patterns to validate feature value and market demand
Explore incentives: Reward taking breaks with badges/longer sessions to build lasting habits
Validate breathing video: Conduct interviews/surveys with varying user groups on user perception towards sponsored breathing videos to validate user receptiveness
Let's yap →