Travel With Instagram — How an Extension of the ‘Collections’ Feature can Work Using Product Management Thinking
Instagram is beating out all the other social media apps and coming out on top as one of the most valuable apps in the world. From its early days of being just a photo filtering tool, to the birth of influencers who can live off their insta-fame — Instagram keeps evolving.
The image heavy platform allows people to document and share their experiences to their friends and to the world. When people scroll through the home feed, every picture triggers some emotion. Maybe the feeling is inspiration, nostalgia, jealousy, or even FOMO.
Being in Product School, I’m starting to be somewhat obsessed with dissecting popular products, exploring user pain points, examining competitive distinctions, and taking a deep dive into features. I started to look at Instagram in a different light to see how it could be improved, and put my product knowledge to work.
This post walks through my thought process on how I came up with this new feature proposal.
What’s your North Star
Having a North Star goal will help you focus your ideas.
Instagram’s mission is to create a community to connect people from all over the world with similar passions through pictures and videos. We also know that advertisements are their biggest revenue driver. Knowing this, I decided that increasing businesses profile conversions would be my North Star, and I would solve it through higher engagement within the app.
Looking into one of Instagram’s newest features, Collections, I wanted to see what new feature I can build to drive business profile conversions.
Taking a look at the current Collections feature
The Collections feature today consists of two main features: Bookmarking and Collections. Let me explain the distinction.
Bookmarking is the act of pressing the bookmark button when you see a post you want to save and it will automatically appear in your Saved Section within your profile under the tab, All (See Figure 1). The Collections is a tab within the Saved Section that allows the user to organize saved content into customizable folders (See Figure 2).
Understanding the user
The way I use Instagram may be very different from how the aggregate users use Instagram so I wanted to look into the data that’s already out there and also conduct a survey on Google Forms to better understand the existing Collections feature.
Key data points I found about the users:
- 54% all Instagram users were Millennials (Age 18–34)
- 59% of those users were Daily Active Users (DAU)
- 30.2% of the DAU were opening up Instagram 10 or more times a day
- Millennials traveler’s activity choices were two times as likely to be influenced by social media than Baby Boomers
- 24% states that their hotel choice was significantly influenced by posts on social media
- 78% of Millennials choose to splurge on experiences over “things”
Key data points I found about the feature:
- 75% of superusers were bookmarking
- 42% of all users were using the Bookmarking feature
- 22% of users were using the Collections feature
- The highest bookmarked content were Travel Destinations at 40%
What the data indicates to me is that Instagram is most popular with Millennials — 30% are classified as superusers. They are using the bookmark feature a lot, and are saving posts that have to do with travel the most. Lastly, studies show that social media highly influences millennial travel activity and decisions.
The key data point that stood out to me was the 47% drop-off from “I use Bookmarks” to “I organize my bookmarks into Collections” in the user journey (42% down to 22%).
Picking the right problem to solve
Being a product manager is not about picking the best idea, but picking the right problem to solve.
What was the job the user wants done (Jobs-to-be-done framework) when using this feature? I started to think about what the ultimate goal was for the user and came up with this statement:
When I bookmark, I want to save the post, so I can reference it later.
I then took a closer look at each feature within the Collections feature separately.
With the Bookmarking feature, the act of bookmarking clearly satisfies the job-to-be-done statement above.
On the other hand, for the Collections feature, whether the act of organizing saved content into folders satisfies the job-to-be-done statement is a little unclear — Do I bookmark, so I can organize my saved posts into folders? Yes, users can reference back to their posts in Collections, but only if they had already organized them into folders in the first place. Users don’t necessarily organize their saved content with the goal to reference back to it later.
So what’s the motivation to organize? Pinterest has these boards where their users take a lot of time to curate because it’s public, and it represents the user and his or her interests. The motivation on making these boards beautiful and well curated is so they can get more followers. Unlike Pinterest, Instagram’s Collections are private. By nature, there is less motivation to organize.
Ok, so I now understand the friction and why 47% of users do not continue to use the Collections feature after bookmarking.
The asset we have is the Bookmaking feature — it solves the user’s ultimate goal. A good question to ask now is what job step within the Bookmarking feature is underserved?
I broke down the job steps within the Bookmarking feature:
- Press the bookmark button — easy!
- Go to the saved section within your profile — easy!
- Scroll to find the post you want to reference back to — this is the underserved job step.
According to my survey, superusers are saving, on average, 17 posts per month. That means, the average superuser would have around 170 posts saved since the feature launched in April, and the amount of saved posts will only continue to increase. That’s a lot of posts a user would have to scroll through to find certain posts they would want to reference back to. Scrolling is the underserved job step that I should be solving for.
Putting a face to the feature
With the data I collected and the insights I found, I created a persona that really shows who I am creating this feature for.
Meet Sam. Although Sam uses Google search, blogs, and Yelp to plan trips, she prefers to use Instagram. She likes the fact that she can find authentic experiences of local places through pictures. Sam is planning a trip to NYC. She knows she has all these saved West Village brunch and coffee spot posts, but she’s scrolling and scrolling and can’t seem to find them in her saved section.
Her frustration and our goal is clear — As an Instagram superuser, to easily reference back to a saved post, I can search using keywords, filter my bookmarks by location, and switch to a map view to drill down to a collage of pictures by location.
The case for why
The current Collections feature is live, but the data suggests that there is friction in organizing saved posts in a collection (folders) because it doesn’t fully satisfy the customer need. Being able to find a saved post is the user’s ultimate goal and I believe, by adding a location filter for users who are bookmarking travel destinations, will create a better experience in the initial planning stages of a trip.
Prototyping
Introducing the Saved Location Filter. Adding a keyword search and location filter (See Figure 3 — Feature A and B) should not impact the current Saved Section or flow. From an engineering perspective, it should be pretty light as it is simply a query-like function to filter content with keywords and geo-location tags. Where I find a little more difficulty is in the map view (See Figure 4 — Feature C) and the function of zooming in and out to provide a collage of pictures by location — which I foresee to be more design and engineering heavy.
Here are some mock-ups I created simply by using Photoshop:
What does success look like?
After the prototype is built, how do we test this on Sam, our superuser? How do we make sure she is winning?
I believe that an increase in engagement with saved posts, will lead to increased consumption in geo-tagged posts. It is safe to assume that a large amount of geo-tagged locations have to do with businesses. By correlation, location based customer engagement data will eventually lead to more business profile conversions (ad revenue).
After launching the Saved Location Filter feature, I will be tracking these metrics:
- Week 1 (W1) user engagement
- Total number of times people are using the feature
- Number of unique users who are using the feature
- Percentage of your total active users who are using the feature
- Average number of times per day users are using the feature
- Session length within saved section
To see if my statement, “an increase in engagement with geo-tagged posts, will eventually lead to more business profile conversions” is true, I would look at:
- % of traffic going to geo-tagged posts
- Correlation of increased engagement to business profile conversions
- Historical behavior/flow of business profile conversions — test, measure, and repeat before determining if there is causation
Spreading the word
Utilizing Instagram’s current go-to-market strategy, I would start out with an Instagram post. Instagram has 231 million followers who will see this new post introducing the new Saved Location Filter feature on their home feed — an easy way to get the word out. This would be immediately followed by an in-app update on the App Store, a press release post on Instagram’s blog in Tumbler, a TechCrunch article, and a fun tweet to wrap it all up.
In short
There are so many industry research trends that are pointing to social media as a travel planning tool. Through my research, insights, and user stories, I hope the Instagram team will see that these product visions and features will be key to help their users win.
Instagrammers may even get to enjoy that feeling of delight when they finally get to resolve their FOMO. This Saved Location Filter can help their users take a step closer to actually exploring that place they have been wanting to go to.
