Contextual Inquiry — Instagram Usage Patterns in Young Urban India

In the final year of my undergraduate program in UX design, I took up a project on Social Media and Digital Wellbeing. During the research phase of the project, I began to notice discrepancies in the secondary data I got online and the primary data I obtained from interviews & surveys. It was not long before the reason for this became quite evident. In fact, there were two major reasons for this:
- Social media is highly dynamic: The usage patterns change drastically with the advent of new platforms and new features on these platforms. A study done in 2009 might not hold any relevance in today’s context. Instagram did not even exist in 2009. Similarly, there is no way to predict how TikTok might disrupt social media usage in the next two years.
- Social media usage patterns differ across geography: Most of the literature I reviewed for my project was based on experiments and studies done in the US or Europe. The differences in the quantitative data are quite obvious in this. For example, Pinterest is relatively much more popular there than in India. But even the qualitative data tends to be different as other factors like demographics and culture also come into play.
I decided to conduct a full-fledged primary research on the social media usage pattern. More than getting numbers and graphs, I was interested in finding out the patterns and the psychology behind general social media usage in urban India. I defined a few demographics to ensure that the data was relevant to the chosen motive.
- Age-group: between 16 and 24 years
- Gender: all
- Geography: urban India
- Economic Status: middle class & upper middle class
The research was to be conducted in two phases:
- Online survey
- Contextual Inquiry
In total, the sample size for the survey was 84 and I had a contextual inquiry with 12 participants.
Questionnaire
To ensure going deeper into the chosen area of exploration, I narrowed down to studying the usage patterns only on Instagram (for a very good reason for Instagram being the most preferred social networking app in the target audience). I created a questionnaire, first for the surveys, and then another one based on the responses to get meaningful qualitative data in the contextual inquiry that followed. The questions were broadly classified under the following categories (for my reference):
- Usage patterns
- Tendency & habits
- Reflection & introspection
- Mental health & digital wellbeing
- Effect of brands and influencers
- Online communication
The respondents were assured of anonymity beforehand to ensure that they are free to voice their opinions. From my previous experiences, I have often noticed people choosing the option which should be right, rather than what is right for them.
Results and Insights
In the next few sections, I have written only about the interesting finds, or rather, I have omitted the uninteresting and the obvious to honor brevity and to keep the content engaging.

- The new news channel: Instagram has become a major source of news and information. With a very few young Indian adults on Twitter and growing distances with television, Instagram serves as a daily update to happenings in the world.
- The creative ‘gram: Contrary to the popular belief of Instagram being a platform of sharing personal photos, people are highly interested in sharing photographs that show their creative side — this ranges from flaunting mobile photography skills to sharing artwork.

- Quality over quantity: People are more interested in the ‘who’ over ‘how many’. When it comes to comments, comment on your post from someone they admire or someone who has a large follower base is much more valuable. Also, a few people admit to getting an occasional like from a verified account or an account with many followers, but most of the time they assume it to be an automated like.
- 10k followers = many: The definition of a substantial follower base has turned to 10,000 (a few people pointed out the fact that this is where Instagram replaces the exact numbers with a k for thousand). Also, the swipe up feature in the stories gets unlocked after you reach 10k followers.
Flow Model

A Common Scenario



Sequence Model

Cultural Model

Artifact Model

Physical Model

- Stories over Feed: On average, stories are more popular (in terms of posting and consumption) than the feed. Also, more people tend to share their personal photographs on stories. Other popular content shared on stories include quotes, memes, and posts spreading awareness to an important issue like animal abuse and climate change.
- Following-follower ratio: More than the exact numbers, it is the ratio between the number of people one is following to the number of followers that gives a better sense of social proof. For example below, the left image has a higher perceived social score compared to the right one even though both of these have an equal number of followers.

- Relatives on Instagram: Although Facebook remains the favorite platform for most of the respondents’ parents (Whatsapp being the ultimate choice for messaging), many older family members now have an account on Instagram. This leads to several implications. Instagram was earlier perceived as a playground for self-expression and freedom for many Millenials, where they did not think twice before posting something which might not make their parents happy — different political opinions, support for a specific group, slang terms, etc. This has led to an increased filter check before posting. Many respondents admitted to hiding their stories from their relatives to avoid questioning and eventual embarrassment.
Overall, the study helped me to see beneath the tip of the iceberg to not only find out patterns but also to explore the reasons behind them. This served as a precursor to further develop my understanding of social media from an Indian context in fields ranging from digital wellbeing to the effect of influencers in making decisions. An interesting next step could be to have a similar contextual inquiry in rural India or on a different emerging platform like TikTok and to check if the tendencies and patterns behind the usage tally with the results obtained here.

