How TikTok works

In collaboration with a team of data reporters, I created data visuals for a series of stories on how TikTok works. The series analyzed real user data from over 1,000 different people to explore how the app builds feeds engages people.

The first story looked at how users get hooked on the app, increasing their usage over time. After five months of usage, even the least active cohort of users spent more than an hour on the app each day, on average.

To explain and demonstrate this change, I created dashboard-style data viz animations (using GSAP and D3).

Another story focused on how the algorithm works. We were able to create a map of hashtags from the content people watched, with hashtags that were more likely to be viewed by the same users grouped more closely together.

I built an interactive component to explore the hashtags, using React and a custom Canvas animation in Javascript to draw the hex maps.

Using Node.js scripting and a virtual Canvas, I also generated over 1,000 unique maps for each participant who donated their data to our reporting. Everyone recieved a “Map of TikTok” with their personalized user data, showing where the kinds of videos they watched were located within our model of all of TikTok’s content.