Can’t believe Instagram would make this mistake

My friend Jennifer and I were catching up in a coffee shop, when suddenly she whispered, embarrassed: “Hey, how do you post more than one Instagram story per day?” I popped my eyes 😳 surprised and, for a moment, not knowing what to think or where to begin… and then I thought, there must be something terribly wrong with Instagram’s product, since the answer seems to be intuitive to some users and not at all to others.
So let’s dive in and find out what happened.

The Problem

Most of us know what a button is. Buttons have been around for a few decades now and people are quite used to them. They started as physical push-buttons and quickly migrated to computer and smartphone screens. Each button typically has only one job, and whenever manufacturers overload them with multiple functions, users are confused and frustrated.

Here is what current Instagram Stories look like. Top right you can see your profile picture with a small blue round ⊕ button on the corner, which suggest that you can create a story. Based on the latest usage statistics of Instagram Stories, at least 100 million users understand this. You tap that button, capture a moment, submit and you are back to your feed. Now that you recorded something, your stories panel looks like this:

Blue ⊕ button disappeared and your profile picture got a pretty circle around it. You tap on it again and you can view the story you just published. Wait, but where did the create buttons go? Does this mean I can publish only one story each 24 hours? Frustrated, some users might tap around, in hopes of finding a way to capture their moment again. If they don’t succeed within a few seconds, they are likely to decide “that’s the way it is” and now will create less content and be less engaged 😿.

Those of us, who belong to the Snapchat and Tinder generation, will likely try to swipe around and accidentally stumble upon a capture screen that slides in from the left. And the rest of us — will just give up and move on with life.

Core problem here is lack of consistency with the original design principles Instagram followed.

Instagram is coming from those early app ecosystem times, when best apps strictly followed Apple’s Usability Guidelines. Each app had it’s main navigation in the bottom bar, self-explanatory icons, labels. All key actions were performed by tapping buttons.

But then, Snapchat, with it’s playful, not obvious interaction patterns came along and began threatening Facebook. As we all know, if Facebook can’t acquire something, it will furiously copy it. And so they did! They took Snapchat’s Story feature, along with it’s interaction patterns that were designed for millennial users, and dropped it on Instagram, that was built for a completely different type of user.
Result? Many Instagram users are alienated.

How can Instagram improve?

Let’s start by keeping all buttons in their place, without creating ambiguous, confusing situations. Here is are some rough sketches.

User does not have any stories captured yet, and Your Story CTA is prominent:

User published a story or two, but we are still keeping Your Story button in it’s place, inviting user to capture more and more moments:

What do you think?

Conclusion

I wonder, how many millions of users are currently recording only 1 story per day. Actually, let me guess — around 43 million. (Instagram Stories got ~100M MAU and ~43% of them are in 30+ age category. Tweet me if you derived a different number.) But I guess, these millions are negligible for Zuck and Kevin Systrom in this innovation race with Evan Spiegel. Or are they?

Big thanks to
Zach Moore for edits; To Jennifer M Choi for edits and inspiration!