Analyse your favourite app in terms of interface, data and logic
Instagram has an intuitive interface, and I would argue it’s thanks to the simple design of it. Every picture/video on the app is square which makes navigation of the app a breeze for the user when they are trying to view multiple images. This way of presenting every image with squares of the same size allows Instagram to display content in easy to view grids when a user is using the search feature or viewing someones profile. The only exception to the square interface, are profile pictures and stories, which are always circles. This helps the user further understand what something is, just at a glance. In addition, to help the user understand when another user has a story, there will be a outer ring around a users profile made out of Instagram’s unique gradient it uses in its logo. The apps symbols are simple but they work perfectly; a house (for home), a magnifying glass (for searching), a square with a + symbol (for adding your own content), and so on. But there is one symbol of the interface I find interesting, because it meets the purpose of telling a user what it does, which is to go to direct messages. But the symbol itself is bizarre which I like because I can’t recall any other app doing that, but like I said it still works.
Because Instagram is a social platform, its content is made by its users. Any whitespace the app has is used for text information such as; image captions, usernames, and comments. Other than the images/videos themselves, the other kind of data on the app is stories which are weird kinds of data that expire after some time. And stories, unlike other content on the app isn’t square. It’s full screen and can be a number of things other than more pictures or videos. Theres live streaming which users can use to broadcast themselves to everyone. Or theres the more simple ones like boomerang, which allows users to make a short video that plays normally but repeatedly goes backward returning, like a boomerang, to be played again.
What I like about Instagram most of all is that its logic is intuitive, if you want to see content you touch it. And the content is easy to find from the start, your stories feed is always at the top of the home section, so to browse them you scroll right to left until then touch. Or to view your feed it’s right there, so start scrolling down. The best part is uploading your own data, just look for a + and touch it either by your profile picture in your stories feed, or for your own pictures it’s bottom centre. Or you can just swipe left for making your story, and right for getting to your message inbox.
It’s also important to mention the app has geolocations implemented allowing users to tag where they are, which appears just bellow their username in the app. And if you touch the name a location, you can then see other pictures that have been tagged with that location. This is great if a user is trying to find out lets say, what a restaurant is like. They can simply browse through the content tagged with the location and gather peoples opinions based on the posts they find. In addition, features like this can also be used by a user in their story as a filter with options like weather and day of the week included.
