Mindful Instagram

Helping users track and understand their emotions on Instagram

The reason why I got rid of Instagram is because I was using it mindlessly and it was affecting me negatively so I would definitely use something like this.

My Roles

• Market and user research
• Sketching
• Wireframing
• Prototyping
• User testing
• Visual design

Background

Social media has permeated nearly every aspect of our lives but we are only just beginning to understand how it impacts the way we think, interact and feel. In the little time we have had to study its impacts, there has been an increasingly strong association between social media usage and negative implications for our mental health and wellbeing.

With mental health issues on the rise, interest in mindful practices such as meditation is at an all-time high. Aiming to cultivate a greater awareness of thought, emotional and behavioral patterns, mindful practices enable greater mental clarity and compassion for ourselves and, in turn, others, leading to an expansion of choice and capacity in how to constructively respond to challenging emotions or situations.

However, today’s research surrounding mental wellbeing and technology is relatively immature, providing a potentially valuable yet under-explored approach to combatting the negative influences of social media. Thus, this presents opportunities to explore how applying mindfulness principles to technology may revert the negative implications that social media has on our wellbeing. With its high prevalence amongst those aged 16–24, a crucial period for emotional and psychological development, Instagram serves as a strong candidate for the purpose of this exploration.

Research

Much of the research was geared towards verifying these opportunities in the cross-field of social media and mindfulness. With the research goals shown below, I hoped to define Instagram’s emotional and mental impact on its existing users, pinpoint its source and evaluate its severity.

Research Goals

• Who are the current users?
• What motivates the current users to use Instagram?
• What do they like and dislike about their experiences with Instagram?
• Do they notice an emotional shift while using the platform?
• What is the source of this shift?
• How do they react to or address these emotions?
• How do we define mindfulness and wellbeing?

Research Methods

To define Instagram’s impact on its current users, I needed a sizable sample of research participants and a list of evaluative questions, and because of the time constraint and limited amount of resources, interviewing alone seemed impractical. For this reason, I decided to conduct a survey, which also allowed me to narrow down the scope of the problem and uncover deeper insights through interviewing.

• Survey responses: 23
• People interviewed: 4

Define

Affinity map

Affinity Map

I recorded the survey and interview observations on individual sticky notes. Organizing them based on similarity, I was able to find the most common trends, frustrations or pain points, and verify whether these represent an opportunity for the application of mindfulness principles. The top three issues that I uncovered are:

• Compare and despair
• Insecurity about personal content
• Number of comments and likes having an emotional impact

While all three of these issues highlight a range of emotional challenges that users experience while using Instagram and surface areas of human-tech interaction that may benefit from mindful practices, the first issue “compare and despair” was identified as the most valuable to solve. Not only does it pertain to features that users interact with the most (i.e., Instagram’s feed and stories features), it also proved to be the most severe given the lexicon of emotional adjectives used by research participants (i.e., terrible, falling short, lonely, etc.). This was underlined by the survey stats:

• 87% of the participants have felt FOMO while using Instagram
• 78% have felt insecure
• 74% have felt lonely
• 70% have felt anxious
• 57% have felt depressed

POV

As illustrated by both the survey and interview results, users’ current solution to the above issues involves some version of “digital detox”, whether if it is unplugging from Instagram altogether or deleting the mobile app to restrict access. 78% of the survey participants said they want to cut down the amount of time spent on Instagram. However, this is not only regressive and unsustainable, it also goes against the business goal of maximizing user sessions on the platform.

Project goals

This calls for the need to frame the problem such that it unearths the underlying issue behind users’ need to unplug, so we can align business goals with user goals by helping users eradicate this issue on the platform. This leads to the following problem statement:

Casual Instagram users need a more uplifting platform experience because they feel negatively when they compare themselves to others.

How Might We Statements

I then formulated a few “how might we…” statements to reformat the problem to uncover a wide range of ideas with unique, specific solutions. Referring to Stanford d.school’s method of changing the HMW statement’s goal, I was able to discover a number of perspectives and adequately prepare for the ensuing brainstorming session. “How might we…”

• Turn the negative influences of Instagram content into something positive?
• Prevent users from seeing content that makes them feel negatively?
• Help users be mindful of the content that makes them feel negatively?
• Help users choose to not compare themselves?
• Leverage other resources on Instagram to help users feel confident and grateful?
• Help users feel grateful about what they have?
• Transform Instagram into a fun, empowering and grounding platform?
• Discourage users from posting heavily filtered content?

Defining Mindfulness

Now that I have a better understanding of Instagram’s impact on users’ mental and emotional wellbeing, my next step is to define mindfulness, through which I can then explore the applicability of its principles during the ideation phase.

Gathering research from various sources, I defined mindfulness as such:

The usage of an awareness-based technique to cultivate self-awareness, embodiment, non-distraction and balance, in order to create the space within oneself to choose and respond in accordance to one’s wellbeing.

Ideate

Brainstorming

Leveraging the HMW statements as a springboard and keeping in mind the definition of mindfulness, I generated the following ideas. Instead of recording them on individual sticky notes, I decided to visualize the ideas in order to quickly capture them in their original forms.

Ideas from the brainstorming session

Product Roadmap

These ideas were then filtered through the project goals shown above, prioritizing the following ideas due to their alignment with both user and business goals, as well as their incorporation of awareness-based practices.

Product roadmap

Site Map

Because these features will be integrated into Instagram’s existing mobile app, a site map is helpful in figuring out the appropriate placement of these features to ensure a seamless integration and smooth user experience.

Site map

Task Flows

Because of the site map I was able to see how users would flow through the updated Instagram app. Mapping out the flow for each individual task not only provides more clarity on the functionalities of the features, but also helps me visualize how the features will be integrated and what they will look like with the rest of the app.

Task flows

Prototyping & Iterations

Paper Prototyping

I find paper prototypes extremely helpful, as it bypasses the added complexity of branding and technicalities, allowing for quick turnarounds and rapid improvements. Here’s the link to the paper prototype (screenshots are shown below).

Paper prototype screens

Main feedback:

• The happy face icon looks like a shortcut to the emoji keyboard
• Not too much motivation to label posts with emotions; will label posts with emotions if I can access it later or know what information or help I can get out of it
• Why is grateful at 0%?
• What is the time range of the data?
• What is this line graph? How many posts?
• Which mood does the “filter content by mood” toggle automatically filter?
• Are the “filter content by mood” and “explore by mood” features based on the posts I’ve labeled or the posts that other people have labeled as well?

Mid-fidelity Wireframes

Due to the time constraint I integrated the above feedback directly into the next phase — mid-fidelity wire framing (if I had more time or resources I would have taken advantage of the quick and simple nature of the paper prototyping stage by making as many iterations in this stage as possible). Below you can see how I changed some screens based on user responses.

Iterations based on user feedback

In creating the mid-fidelity wireframes I mainly referred to Instagram’s existing screens for various UI patterns to ensure a seamless integration. As you can see from the mood board below, I also looked for mood tracker- and analytics-related UI patterns for the emotion-based feedback and mood report features, respectively.

Mood board

Branding

I created a style guide based on Instagram’s existing branding. It was quite difficult as the amount of brand resources online is very limited.

Style guide

The Solution

Reflections

Working alone on a project can be challenging when it comes to time and resources. In these cases, it is crucial to validate the various assumptions and design decisions early on so that time and resources are used wisely throughout the process. Thus, I leveraged a simple paper prototype to gain valuable insights into user behavior, their expectations, what worked for them and what did not. Doing so helped me use my time and resources as efficiently as possible, iterate quickly and remain user-centric throughout.

Overall, this is my favorite project yet, as it aligns with my mission to improve wellbeing through design. Speaking about the industry as a whole, my hope is to at least inject more deliberation and creativity into the conversation surrounding social media and mental health, if not instigate real change. At the individual level, I hope these features will enable users to become aware of the negative emotions, such as self-shame, that arise during their interactions on the platform. In becoming aware, they are in effect stepping outside and simply observing the storm that are their negative thoughts and emotions instead of getting swept up and tossed around by it. This mindfulness and disengagement then create the space for users to actually understand the source of these negative emotions and learn how to diffuse them, leading to inner peace and long-term wellbeing.

Next Steps

• Test the usability of the high-fidelity prototype and iterate based on synthesized insights
• Conduct a diary study to see if the features have indeed led to a change in user behavior and experiences over time, and make improvements accordingly