Instagram: from share… to sharer!
Now you and your friends can share photos on Instagram more easily:
create your shared folder (or as many as you want!), add photos and videos and get notified when new files are added.
Instagram is the third most used network in Spain, after WhatsApp and Facebook, with +400 million active users and more than one hour of daily use
“Two years ago, the social media giant Instagram undertook a bold move — it took the best product from Snapchat, its direct competitor, and added its own a twist to create Instagram Stories”.- 99Firms.
After that, it seems a great challenge trying to add a meaningful new feature to Instagram… in just four days. Let’s go for it!
Challenge
Problem
Role
Goal & Objetives
Requirements & limitations
Tools & RoadmapDesign Process
Research & Investigation
Defining the Problem
Ideating a Solution
Prototyping & TestingSolution
Next Steps
Key Learnings
Challenge overview
Problem: Add a New Feature to Instagram within 4 days, related to share/collaborate
Requirements & limitations: Not redesign the app, but develop a solution visually consistent with the app. Have I mention yet the 4 days deadline? ;)
Role: UX/UI Designer
Tools: Google Drive, Miro, Sketch, InVision
Road Map: Followed roadmap
Design Process
I used the Design Thinking methodology, with a Design Sprint approach.
Research & Investigation
For the research, I decided to do interviews in order to delve deeper into the motivations and frustrations behind this users’ behavior.
I also wanted to find out their needs. So I asked them about the kind of content that they share and why, learning other important details as if they share more than one picture at a time, with more than one person or if they want to keep this content to come back to it.
It is important to let your interlocutor answer freely and not cut them off when they have just answered your question. You can even go further in their answers to get more relevant information you had not taken into account.
I organized the answers and elaborate an Affinity Map to spot similar insights that could help me evaluate how to incorporate the new feature. Some of the most relevant insights were:
“When I want to send more than one photo I have to send one at a time and it is a drag”
“It would be nice to have something like Google Drive where you can add and remove users, so my friend can collaborate and add pictures.
This way the archives stay in the cloud and you don’t lost them nor fill up your phone.”
“Have a common place where several friends can share photos of the same topic and be able to add whoever they want to collaborate”
“I would like that the stories and photos they send me could be saved in some way”
Defining the Problem
After analyzing and synthesizing the observations, I defined the User Persona with specific goals, needs and frustrations to help me with clarfying the problem.
User Persona
He is Andy Handyman, a 32 years old IT Technician from Barcelona. He likes to go out with friends, cycling and do small fixies. His motto is “The best things are the ones you’ve made by yourself”.
Andy is a DIY lover, always looking for the next project to share with his friends. Recently, he has found a really cool old bike frame and he’s looking for ideas on how to fix it on Instagram.
His friends Rosa and Luis are also Instagramers and they want to help him by sending some photos they have found.
Based on the information obtained in the interviews, I diagram the process of how Rosa, Luis and Andy share the photos. I tried to understand this process and determined the most frustrating steps to see how to improve them (User Journey).
User Journey
With all this valuable information in mind, I came to the problem statement.
Problem Statement
“Instagramers who share a lot of photos with their friends on a topic need a place to collaboratively contribute photos that are easy to retrieve”
Ideating a Solution
I already had some information about how the users already were doing this task, the most frustrating steps and some desirables from the interviews.
An User Flow is the path that a typical user takes in a website or application to complete a task. Doing a User Flow helped me narrowing the solution by answering this key questions:
- How would the feature work?
- Where and when is the best way to apply the feature?
Instagram already allowed you to create different folders to keep your favourite pictures. We just needed to have the option of sharing these folders with friends and allow them to aggregate pictures too.
Prototyping & Testing
Following the “Fail Fast, Fail Often” Agile philosophy principle, I’ve started to test the solution with hand-drawn low fidelity prototypes. This allowed me to test ideas quickly, identify the hits of the process and correct the main problems.
From the Low-fidelity prototype I’ve learned where and when was the best way to apply the feature of sharing the folder, at a screen level.
With the mid fidelity wireframes, I passed the main screens design through a first Heuristic Evaluation to evaluate if the decisions I made to solve the problems were the best.
I continued testing with mid-fidelity and high-fidelity.
From high-fidelity I’ve learned to follow the challenge requirements. I had to keep consistency with the brand guidelines but also with Instagram navigation (Nielsen’s #4 principle “Recognition rather than recall”) instead of trying to find out a better way.
Solution
Here’s my high fidelity prototype. Let’s see how it works!
Next Steps
- Intelligent shared folder marcation: Explore futher the share options.
- Push notifications: As for other Instagram actions, to have the option of activating push notifications for shared folders.
- Group conversations on Instagram Direct: Facilitate the users to comment the shared content in Instagram, all the users of the same shared folder in the same place.
Key Learnings
You are not the user: Although I was clear that I am not the user, I did have to deal with some assumptions from the previous research
Following the brand guidelines: I had to take a step back to stick to the challenge instructions & restrictions. One thing at a time!
Updated March, 2023: Instagram announces the Collaborative Collections Feature implementing shared folders ;).
Update November 2020: This challenge took place in May, 2019. From then to now, Instagram has published a pretty neat brand resources web and has incorporated group conversation in Instagram Direct.
Thanks for reading! I will appreciate your feedback. Feel free to reach me on LinkedIn :)
