Instagram began as a photo and video sharing app for your friends and family with a mission “to capture and share the world's moments”. Over time this app has grown to roughly 1 billion active users worldwide.
Instagram has been losing traction to their competitors and have been linked to bad mental health in young adults. Therefore, how might we create a feature which reduces anxiety about posting while increasing user engagement?
A new feature which allows users to post private images/videos to only those in their close friends list.
We want to know users values and their pain points so that we can design an additional feature for Instagram.
- Social media is linked to poor mental health, specifically anxiety, depression, and FOMO (Times).
- Users appreciate privacy, celebrities and regular userss create Finsta's (i.e., fake Instagrams) to share intimate moments with close friends and family (NY Times)
- Social media is killing friendships, broadcasting is not enough, you need one-on-one interaction (Healthline).
-Instagram is the second most downloaded app behind TikTok and has 1.22 billion active users each month.
- 71% of users are under 35 years old
- In the US, 75% are between 18 and 24
- 50.8% of users identify as female
- 59% of adults use Instagram daily for an average of 30 minutes
- Users feel more comfortable with close friends
- Users feel axious on social media
- Most users don't use the close friends feature (yet)
- Most users see influencers post over friends
- 20/25 users feel that there is less pressure to post on their story (2 neutral)
- 13/25 users feel pressure to post on their feed (6 neutral)
Define the scope of the project and its information architecture.
Determine the navigation and informational flow on the website.
To show the posting process flow with decisions in mind, the highlighted section is what I contributed to Instagrams flow.
I started thinking about the layout and design of the website.
I grabbed my pen and paper and started sketching ideas for the screens based on the user research, then took to my iPad for clearer images.
I created the beginning wireframes
I kept to Instagrams color palette and layout and added additional icons for the new feature.
From my user flow and 1-1 interviews, I identified key moments in the user journey and focused my efforts on the screens that were most important in the posting process for Close Friends.
In order to check whether or not the screens work as intended, I set up a prototype in Figma and conducted usability testing to gain insight on the websites functionality.
I created an interactive high fidelity prototype in Figma to test the usability of the website.
I used the data from the usability test (affinity map) to create a priority matrix in order to identify which revisions were high priority and focussed on those fixes first.
The main revisions which were feasible for the time constraint.
The goal of this project was to add a feature to Instagram that allowed users to post more with ease and get them back on the app in general.
Well I like to think so, I had a 100% completion rate and quotes from usability participants like...
"I was skeptical at first but this is an amazing feature!"
"I want this to be a feature now!"
"I really like it, it was integrated so well it already feels like it's a part of instagram."
"I love the concept, I would for sure use this."
"It's like combining the phenomena of finsta but just on one account so you don't have to switch."
I would add various updates to the features
Throughout this process, I learned a lot about in-house design. I implemented various user research strategies and designed with error prevention in mind. I also learned the importance of balancing user needs with business goals.
Next time I will...
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