Instagram Reimagined

Product Designer, UX Designer

My Role

Project

Academic Research, Individual

Timeline

February - May 2022 (4 months)

Tools Used

Figma

Background

Media Archaeology motivates me to investigate media from obsolescence to new when thinking about the meanings of what technology we should have for human interactions. I learned how Media Archaeology works from the reading "Parikka". One quotation that pushes me to explore more on the project could be this, "New media might be here and slowly changing our user habits, but old media never left us."

Role

The individual project is going to redesign Instagram to iterate the obsolescence features that may be able to revive. The first article that I found is about the evolution of Instagram UX which is including icons, accessibility, and features. The second one is a video that is about the Instagram UX evolution too. It could let me easily eye-track the transformation of the interfaces and the color scheme of the Instagram app in iOS. The third one is about the history of major design changes across different widespread mobile apps. I could depend on the articles' pros and cons to see what the differences are between the two popular apps.

Business Goal

Prompting questions about whether the classical and modern Instagram apps can be easy to view.
Providing a pure browsing and photography experience to make it easier to navigate on bigger screens such as iPads and Macs, through basic interactions and customizable features.
Improving customer satisfaction to incorporate multiple personalized modes to create an entirely new experience for iPhones, iPads, and Macs.
Reimagining alternative features for the future while maintaining and drawing upon the classic Instagram interface.

Research

Understand users’ common behavior of using Instagram and other social media apps.
Draw some major updates of interfaces on the draft to see the significant differences.
Discover the pain points or poor UX of using Instagram.
Explore both ordinary and professional users’ needs on social media apps.

Research Goal

We conducted several of the popular social media app interfaces and features from the online resources to make a comparative analysis. The Usability Script we created especially for the potential users to do an interview with different kinds of people. We randomly selected 5 people from 20 to 40-year-old to based on our script to collect data and feedback. The interviews were fully online through the Zoom call and the interviewer recorded the audio to make notes on each script file.

Research Method

The questions we generated were based on the resources we collected and our own experiences while using social media apps. The three topics of questions are background, detailed, and follow-up. The background questions instructed interviewees to reflect on their own user experiences. Detailed questions continued to ask interviewees for answers in a deep way. The follow-up questions were based on the previous questions we asked to discover further.

The results we collected reflect the changes that keep making users increasingly irritated and dissatisfied based on new updated features which could make users distracted not only about the photography works. We may design an initial page and navigation button that focuses on photography, and keep the features to make users with high satisfaction.

Questions

Re-think the idea of redesigning an interface that brings back great memories of the Instagram app and utilizing a new design language to give people an easy-to-use and natural way to use the app with users' original habits. I discovered to keep the app in a unique language, and remove copied features or adjust the features to make it distinctive. It may bring engagement to the Instagram app, and reduce the number of users who do not want to use the app anymore. An early brainstorming means I did not make a decision on what kind of project I am going to make. The take feedbacks were about the overall ideas. It could give me ideas that can help me to do further research on the project. For example, what types of themes I am going to work on. If I made a certain theme, what kinds of material do I need to collect and research?

Research Findings

People Problem

Lots of people looking for is to be available on bigger size devices natively. As time goes by, more people using tablets and laptops to do tasks that smartphones may not be able to do. Bigger views are always good for photos and videos, and the app should have a perfect way to show on the frames.