Instagram Case Study ✏️
A redesign of the one of the world’s most famous apps based on user research and experience.
TOOLS
Invision, Figma
TYPE
UX&UI Design
ROLE
Product Designer
UX Researcher
DURATION
Summer 2020
(1 Month)
📚 Introduction
The why: I wanted to take an application I use everyday and reimagine it into something new and exciting while pushing myself as a creative and designer.
I’ve been actively using Instagram since 2012 — having been an early user of Instagram, I’ve seen it’s aesthetic vision continue to grow and challenge its’ counterparts. Instagram has long worked to develop and implement new features for users and brands alike and has thus allowed me, a user of 8 years, to continue connecting with it.
My Goals
My goals for redesigning the application:
To design a more personable and unique user interface
To design a more engaging experience to stay connected
My personal goals:
After taking courses in research methods, I wanted to learn how to conduct and analyze user research while creating flowcharts
Gain valuable design experience from start to finish with wireframing, designing, and developing prototypes
Understanding Instagram, the company
Instagram is a visual-storytelling application that provides a platform for users to curate and share life’s beautiful and creative moments. Since its debut in 2010, Instagram’s user base has grown into the hundreds of millions, allowing people from all over the world to connect and share moments from their life.
To keep up with its ever growing presence, Instagram is constantly innovating creatively to push forward its mission of “sharing the world’s moments.”
🌱 RESEARCH I
My User Research + Data
Before beginning this revamping project, I sent out a questionnaire and received 105 total responses allowing me to gain a deeper and clearer understanding of the kinds of users I was designing for:
What features are most popular on Instagram?
What keeps users on this platform?
These questionnaires were taken through Google Forms.
Part of the Google Forms asked which features on Instagram they used.
Target Audience Demographics
Out of the 105 responses, there were 77 females and 28 males. While most of the ages ranged between 18 and 29, 18% of the males were between ages 25 and 30, and only 6.5% of the females were between ages 25 and 30. The majority, 79%, were between the ages 19 and 24 years old.
I felt that these statistics were a decent representative sample of Instagram’s current user base considering:
Even moreso, 82% (86 responses) ranked Instagram as one of their Top 3 Most Used Platforms! Unsurprisingly, 92.4% of the people sampled use their Instagram everyday.
Why Instagram?
What makes Instagram stick out as a platform? What is keeping their user base engaged? I asked the people to describe Instagram and why they use it. What does it allow you to do? What words come to mind when you think of Instagram?
Interactive, Engaging, Connection were the top 3 adjectives used by people in this survey to describe Instagram.
What did they like most about Instagram?
It’s simple and quick
It’s fun and interactive way to stay connected with others
It’s educational and allows them to stay involved as a news outlet
They can discover restaurants, galleries, places, food, and ways to improve their lifestyle through fitness and mental health
What features did they use the most?
Instagram Stories
Discover Page (Notably: Food, Places, Cooking)
Pages of Interest (Cooking, Gymming, Fashion)
💡 The Average Instagram User
Jennifer Hwuang, Age 23
Jennifer is a recent graduate working as a Business Consultant. As a business consultant, Jennifer is required to travel often — to Chicago, New York — wherever her clients are. Whenever she’s on the go, traveling from city to city, Jennifer loves finding late-night foods and places open. She uses Instagram as a way to stay connected on the go, as well as find the best spots and locations when she’s travelling for work.
Jordi Chaffer, Age 25
Jordi is a full-time graduate student at the University of California, Davis pursuing a Master’s in Business Administration and is interested in pursuing a career in Product Management. He loves to try new foods, discover new places to go out with friends. He uses Instagram to stay connected with people in his life, as well as discover new spots to check out. He is also active, using Instagram to change up his workout routines by watching influencer videos and reading their advice.
Maira Blake, Age 21
Maira is an undergraduate student studying Journalism and Political Science. She plans to continue her studies in a law-school program. She loves cooking new recipes, hanging with friends, and occasionally spends time advocating for different projects and social justice issues in the Bay Area. She uses Instagram to stay updated in the political climates as well as check out new recipes from her favorite Chef-Instagrammers.
Who are you able to relate with more? Daniella, who’s busy but finds herself using Instagram in her downtime to discover new places? Maira and Jordi who use Instagram to stay updated on friends, news, and their interests more casually? Or is it a mixture of both?
My mission is to design while keeping users like you, me, Jennifer, Jordi, and Maira in mind.
After conducting all of the user research and gaining a better understanding of what kinds of users I’m designing for, I can dive into design and analyzing Instagram’s current UI.
🤔 Research II
Assessing Instagram’s Current-State
Assessment of the current Instagram Home page and User Profile page
First and foremost, it is important to assess how Instagram functions currently.
This means — what is the design centered around? What kinds of features are available simply as you open the app?
From this, I understand that Instagram is a very user and human-centered app as its own UX and UI translates into having 4+ ways of discovering a users profile, 2+ ways of viewing yours, and directly implements the main features of IGTV, Direct Messaging, and Posting to Story.
Keeping this human-centered design concept will be my first priority so as to preserve the sense of belonging, individuality and personal-importance of Instagram. Aside from having means means of getting to the same pages (user profiles, comments and so forth) there were things I sought to improve based on my own usage as well as the data I had collected.
✒️ Design
Problems, Solutions and Improvements
My full prototype is available here!
✏️ Improvement #1: Discover + Locations
42.5% of the users who responded in the survey mentioned that Instagram allowed them to discover restaurants, photospots, and other locations for hangouts and activities. When taking a look into how Instagram presents locations now, I felt that it could be improved greatly.
When viewing a “spot”, the user is shown Top and Recent tags including this spot. You have the option of viewing it on the map instantly and going into “View Information” to see contact information on the spot.
Instagram’s current discovery of locations is rather limited — offering only the name, category, and phone number. I thought about what users look for the most when they are discovering such locations and with the era of food-instagramming, I decided to include popular items, feature store hours, as well as a review panel. Instagram has made finding new locations, foods and hotspots easy. To add a rating feature would allow users to quickly assess their preference for different locations whether they are casually exploring San Francisco, seeking the glories on vacation, or exploring a brand new city.
The goal of every platform is to retain users — what better way than having all the information you need about a spot available on one screen?
Below, I’ve included the new features under discovering a location on Instagram.
I am continuing to envision this to add ratings, comments, user photos, and menu items with photos. These could become recipe and crafting sections that offer specific information on tools and ingredients required instead of prompting users to a separate link or screen.
This is where my pages begin under Instagram’s ‘Discovery”, I added a star-rating.
I expanded on Instagram’s simple discovery features (only being Address, Category, and Call) by including Hours, Price, Reviews, as well as “favorite items” from particular stores.
Users can now write a review which includes star ratings and helpful tags for future users.
✏️ Improvement #2: Profile Customization and Redesign
Humans have a craving for customization, as it fulfills the desire for control. Customization refers specifically to what the user does to their interface, layout, content or system functionality. Instagram, among other popular social media apps, often offer a wide range of customization options. For Instagram, that is none other than each user expressing their individuality through diverse photos, colors and layouts.
Approximately 26% of the responses in my research indicated that they felt like their profiles were “not customizable enough” and had a lot of information at once. I took the liberty of redesigning its interface to have a move human-centered design.
Commonly among other platforms, most users are able to choose their own cover photo. For Instagram, I have implemented the option to include one. The redesign focuses on a human-approach where the most immediate information about a user is presented at focus: their name, description, and following stats.
✏️ Improvement #3: Flipbook Feature
After receiving feedback in which over 30 responses mentioned either recipes, gymming or general advice as items they look for often on Instagram, I thought about ways I could optimize how users see these interests.
81.9% of the users in my study said they used Instagram to search and discover
77.1% of the users in my study said they used Instagram to follow people and figures
For users like Maira or Jordi, who may be bookmarking recipes, spots, or workouts often, it is normal to see a post of a photo that includes a recipe and/or prompting the user to go to their blog where they can view it. The great thing about Instagram is that so much information is already at your disposal — on a single app. What I reimagined and call my “Flipbook" is a way for instagrammers to compile their engaging, useful content into mini-booklets.
Take Jordi, who often bookmarks different workouts where Fitness Influencers post “do this workout!”. Wouldn’t it be great for Jordi if all of those workouts were compiled in some where — say a Fit-fluencer’s Guide to Tricep and Bicep workouts. This may feature a list of their posts or other posts that provide you exactly that. Flipbooks are meant to serve as compiled sources: that is, say you want that delicious cupcake recipe from Instagram but have only the caption as your reference. Now, these instagrammers can compile their posts, or information, all into a mini-book available at your fingertips on their profile.
When I worked on this feature, I thought about users on Instagram who, yet again, are discovering — be it places, foods or lifestyle changes, and how useful it would be that instagrammers can have mini-booklets of their favorite resources, workouts, recipes, fashion items, mental health practices, and any other information that is often broken into separate posts.
With “Flipbooks” I believe the concept of having a guide to follow all can reimagine Instagram entirely.
Feature 2: Compilations of posts from other instagrammer’s in one, helpful flipbook!
Feature 3: Users can add their own information in their Flipbooks
My feature “Flipbook” featured under an Instagrammer’s feed
📚 Reflecting
🚨 KEY TAKEAWAYS
With reimagined discovery and “Flipbook”, this project has instilled a passion for seeking out ways in which users can respond best to. A struggle I had encountered was focusing on the user-story and not my own individual story. Anytime I found myself caught up in what I personally wanted, I recentered myself with my user profiles and refreshed my brain by looking over my user research responses. This, essentially being the difficult aspect to UX and UI, has drilled in me a yearn to always look elsewhere — to look at users, peers, colleagues, family before centering a thought process around me.
I wanted to immerse myself into a project, test my understanding and capacities in UX research and wrap it up with insightful and useful designs for a user base. The best way to expand a skillset, I’ve learned, is to dive into a project and learn everything bit by bit.
I’ve learned so much from this project — much more than I thought I would. I didn’t think I would be applying my Psychology Research methods course and others but I’m glad to have learned a valuable way to apply these pieces of knowledge and sew them into grand pieces of design and data.
The design process is all about making your own statement through your own work and design. I’ve fallen in love with design for that reason — you’ll hardly ever see anything identical because the beauty in everything is the mere differences themselves. This project helped me learn to do things smarter and more efficiently. There were so many small details I didn’t think were necessary until having taken courses and applying them into this project that I learned their value.
💓 Thanks for reading!
I want to give credits here is where I got inspiration for this project and was an extremely helpful guide for me to do my first ever UX/UI project as I was able to conduct my own research, own data, and create my own designs.
Feel free to check out more of my projects!