Improving Instagram — a simple UX case study

Background

During this lockdown, I open Instagram a lot. In these strange times, I have seldom seen much of other landscape besides the walls of my home and the trees inside my complex. Therefore, the simple notion of looking at other people’s lives inside or outside the confines of their homes is today a great way for us to cope with the situation.

Instagram has a plethora of functions, starting from simple photo posts to selling things online. Same as any product, Instagram is never perfect. In this case study, I tried solving some of Instagram’s usability problems. I intend to approach this case study simply, without forcing myself to use every tool in the box or rigidly following every step of design thinking. I hope to exercise streamlining my thinking process: Problem ➜ Solution.

Research

To identify usability problems, I tried to conduct a small-scale research first by collecting user feedback, which I figured is definitely better than only thinking on my own.

This is what I did:

• Pick 10 friends who are active Instagram users.
• Ask them about one thing you feel annoyed when using Instagram.

Going through a day of gathering insights, I obtained 20 pieces of feedback anecdotes. After further categorizing and prioritizing these feedbacks, I picked several usability problem categories that in my opinion are the most important and actionable:

Usability problem categories, made using Miro.

One point that I find myself agreeing a lot is that there’s too many steps to access Saved Posts. To better illustrate this point, I compiled how many steps it takes to access Saved Posts and Liked Posts.

Current user flow when accessing Saved Posts and Liked Posts.

It turns out that there’s as many as five clicks needed to access these posts. For users who loves saving posts to be read later, this is a big pain point.

After gathering feedback, it’s time to identify the main problems. In lieu of deeper research, I felt creating a persona would be excessive. A simpler method is distilling user feedback in a user story format. I find it perfect for capturing requirements, not too much detail but very descriptive.

User stories.

Wireframes

Now that we have a better grasp of the usability problems, we go straight to making wireframes.

• In order to make content more relevant, new users are given several topics of choice the very first time they log in. That way, account recommendations are better tailored. If you want to change the topics, you can do it in Settings! The inspiration is taken from Pinterest’s app.

• To better fit the definition of timeline, we turn back time to the good old days when Instagram posts and stories are ordered chronologically. Don’t like the “new” timeline? Change it in Settings → Preferences.

• Next, we bring forward the Saves and Likes to the header at the main page. No more hidden or forgotten saved photos. To avoid confusion, the Heart icon for the “Activities” tab is changed to “History” icon. We also give the option to categorize Likes as easily as saves.

• As an alternative, we also propose the left drawer menu, replacing the ever-present bottom bar. It can be opened by choosing the floating burger menu on the bottom-right. Although this arrangement might be a little unusual, more categories can be stuffed in. The inspiration is taken from The Guardian’s app.

• Stories are different in nature to posts. Stories are temporary, posts are eternal. Combining the two ways of creating content contradicts their functions. Therefore, we simply adapt the more complete Story editor functions to the Post editor, while leaving the Story editor in tact.

• Finally, to better categorize “Close Friends” we simply use our existing chat groups. By sharing stories to a group, the stories will be available on the group members’ stories feed — complete with the corresponding label.

In truth, after making several complete case studies, I feel a little bit burned out by the long processes in designing a full-blown application from the ground up. That’s how this simple case study came to be, a little bit of problem-solving exercise to improve our beloved social media app. Even though the suggestions are a little bit scattered about, I hope they help illustrate how the whole Instagram experience could be improved.

Home, over three months into the lockdown period.