We Redesigned Instagram: Putting the Social Back in Social Media
This ten weeks this past winter, a group of 28 Northwestern University students lived and worked in San Francisco as part of the Bay Area Immersion Program. For 10 weeks, we took classes about design, media and innovation with the goal of envisioning a better-designed world, which led us to wonder how we might improve the experience of social media. In our Service Design class, a group of friends — Emma Kumer, David Yoon, Pravika Joshi, Daniel J.S. Brown, and I — decided to redesign one of the most addictive applications on our phones: Instagram.
User-testing for something as universal as Instagram is difficult; it was impossible to set aside our own personal experiences with an app that’s become a part of our daily routine. Instagram is so ubiquitous, especially among our generation, that even asking other users for their pain points was difficult. Most people we spoke to loved Instagram — even though they admitted it took way too much of their time. Similarly, all five of us liked the app and wouldn’t consider leaving it, but we did want it to be less addictive. We wanted to leave the app happier than we entered instead of feeling sad, envious, or ashamed.
In speaking to others, there were a few trends that resurfaced again and again. It was only through the lens of extreme users — or non-users — that we were able to determine that the social media application designed to bring us closer actually brought us further apart. Instagram, through its efforts to bring us all hundreds of followers, widened our circles until we felt like we had a thousand acquaintances rather than a few close friends. Users didn’t care so much about the number of likes on a post as they did the content of the comments; they didn’t look at the number of views on a story so much as they read the replies. The information that people were looking for, again and again, was original messages from real people. Human interaction, not just taps or swipes. The social aspect of social media.
Our goal, throughout this project, was to put the “social” back in social media. We carried out extensive research, user observation, and information analysis, emerging with three refined features designed to optimize the app we already know and love.
Close Friends
In efforts to emphasize the parts of Instagram that foster a smaller community, we want to enhance the close friends feature. As it exists, an Instagram user can select a list of close friends from their pool of followers to allow them to see a private story. This private story and its accompanying UX features are displayed in green.
Who Are Your Close Friends?
In our redesign, creating your close friends list is slightly different. Instead of choosing who can see your content, you’re selecting whose content you can see. For this reason, you create the list by pulling from the people you follow, not the people who follow you.
To build on the current functionality, the close friends tab will still suggest accounts that it believes you consider our “close friends,” based off of whose content you comment on and interact with most often.
You’re All Caught Up
Once this list is created by a user, Instagram will reorder the feed to put your close friends’ posts at the top. You will only see content from these people before reaching the “You’re All Caught Up” checkpoint. This indicator often signals users to leave the app, since they have already seen everything they consider to be new and might allow anxious users that they’ve seen the minimum amount of content necessary to stay up-to-date with their inner circle.
Don’t worry — the rest of your Instagram feed won’t disappear. It will continue after the You’re All Caught Up checkpoint, allowing users to continue scrolling if they have the time or desire.
Jumping Out of Stories
Similarly, our Close Friends update would send a user back to the app homepage after viewing the last story from their closest friends. With the current functionality, it’s very easy to get caught in a never-ending stream of watching stories because the next one starts automatically. With this update, a user is prompted to stop mindlessly watching after they’ve seen the content they deem most important, though they can always click back in if they would like.
Three Different “Story” Outlines
We had the idea to remove the green color from use because it seemed jarring and off-brand for Instagram. Instead, our close friends are represented in the orange-purple gradient that Instagram currently uses for all of its stories.
The non-close friends — the larger bank of people a user is following — are shown in the story bar with light gray outlines. These are designed to be devoid of attention-grabbing colors, making them less appealing for users in general.
Finally, the stories a user has already watched are shown in a stack at the end. The friends retain their original outline color, representing their status as either a typical friend or close one but are reduced to black-and-white to indicate their “watched” status.
Scrapbooks
Although Instagram is described as a “social” media platform, it lacks the key aspect of being collaborative. We wanted to introduce a Google Docs type feature to posting on Instagram, called Scrapbooks. By toggling the feature on when you post, the people you tag will also be added as collaborators to the post. Collaborators can also add pictures and videos to the post from their library or by taking them. By adding collaborators we wanted to take the social interaction of real life and translate them to social interactions online. User research revealed that Instagram largely is a portrayal of the user’s idealized life. By adding a collaborative aspect we hope to promote creation over consumption by putting an emphasis on togetherness in social media making it a more accurate reflection of social life.
How do you post to a scrapbook?
People value social interactions on social media as valuable time so we tried to maximize that with our design and flow for posting a collaborative post. The process of posting is the same, but now there is an added row with a toggle for making the post collaborative. By turning this switch on, all the people you’ve tagged in the post will become collaborators. By doing this, it saves time and makes the process of tagging much more intentional. The user becomes way more conscious of who to tag and who to collaborate with
What does a Scrapbook look like?
We wanted to stay in line with current Instagram design styles, but still add a new dimension to posting and interacting with friends. Scrapbooks hold group memories that can be shared by everyone, with everyone. They’ll display all the information of a regular post: location, caption, and pictures, but they’ll also show who’s a collaborator — providing opportunity for people with mutual friends to connect and expand social circles. Scrapbooks will also have a cap of 20 posts each, in order to avoid photo dumping and spamming. Rather than each individual posting the same picture on their own feed, Scrapbooks add another dimension to ‘tagging’ friends, and instead empower them to post together.
How does a Scrapbook fit into your feed?
Just like there’s a tab for the photos you’ve been tagged in, Scrapbooks will have their own section. However, there will also be the option to make Scrapbooks visible in a user’s main feed. They will be denoted by the lightbulb icon in the top left corner of posts.
Reducing addictive mechanisms, and making use of Instagram more intentional.
Understanding our ethical and moral obligation to users, we hope to make Instagram a more intentional experience. By reducing the mechanisms that tend to keep you mindlessly scrolling through your feed, and by making the privacy and suggestive algorithm features much more transparent, we put content control and agency back in the hands of the social media user.
Three main features of instagram have been redesigned to achieve this goal.
1. Notifications
Non-essential notifications such as those that come from social media apps have been reclassified to be a lower tier of importance. As such, these new notifications have been designed as less eye-catching. By replacing the bright red color of the notification bubble and moving it so that it appears within the bounds of the app icon, social media notifications become far less likely to trigger impulsive interaction, while still remaining perfectly visible. It is also assumed that these notifications could be re-classified as important in your settings, just in case you are worried about missing something important on your socials.
2. Explore Page
Instead of an endlessly updating feed, which is far too easily to mindlessly scroll through, the explore page has become paneled pages. These pages require a physical press of a next button in order to see more content. It is our opinion that simply creating this slight bit of fiction between the user and new content, can be enough pauses to allow users to actually think, and make a conscious decision to continue using the app. It is also true that unlike scrolling which is very easy to lose track of, having to flip through tiled pages that contain the same number of posts on each page, makes it much easier to be conscious of just how much media you’ve consumed. Additionally, instead of Instagram using hidden algorithms to track your viewing habits in order to serve you curated content you will like, this process is now done manually. Right next to the like button on every public post, you can tap the plus, which will then signal to Instagram your interest in that type of continent. These signals will then be collected and categorized within your new “Interest Profile,” alloying you to add, remove and otherwise edit everything Instagram knows about your content preferences. If you feel like your feed is starting to get repetitive or forcing you into a bubble of opinions of viewpoints, you can always remove certain topics and add new ones, or you can pick the random button at the top of the explore page. This button will then ignore your interest profile, and serve you a randomized feed based only on general popularity and engagement across all users.
3. Privacy Settings
In an effort to both encourage transparency, and reduce the comparative and judgment based features of Instagram, privacy and publicity settings are now displayed in a much more prominent and accessible way on personal profiles and posts. While the old Instagram had only an innocuous grey icon next to your name to signify whether or not your posts are public or private, the redesign features more more bright and prominent indicators of exactly which mitrics of your account are viewable to strangers. If you are still unclear, tapping on these icons will reveal a short description, and an invitation to learn more about what that icon means. Especially with young users who may be otherwise confused about strangers viewing their posts, the hope is that these new icons make your level of privacy much more clear and understandable. Lastly, all personal posts will now have eyes under likes and comments which can be toggled at any time. The idea is that much of the anxiety and social damage said to be caused by social media, starts with the quantitative ranking and approval systems built into posts. By giving users the option to hide their likes, comments, and follower counts, we hope to reduce the often emotionally destructive effects of worrying about public perception and social ranking online.
This by no means is an exhaustive redesign of Instagram, and it also isn’t done! Our quarter ended (too soon), and we wanted to release this out to the world as a v1.0 to get more feedback! None of us are professional UI or UX designers, although we hope to be soon, so we tried our best to match Instagram’s brand and style guidelines. Let us know what you think!
