Save it! — Proposing an Instagram feature addition
01. PROBLEM SPACE
(pointing to phone screen): Look at this dessert! Looks yum! We should try this place when we get back to Atlanta.
Me: Ooo! For real. Bookmark it.
Friend: *Screenshots the picture*
Me: ???​
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Problem
This got me thinking! Do Instagram posts about food/drinks actually influence people to try out new restaurants/cafès/bars? If they do, is there a way for users to curate newly discovered places on the same platform? Time to find out!
Project details
This is a passion project I worked on over an idea that struck me while traveling over the summer.
Tools
Sketch, Adobe Photoshop, InVision
02. USER RESEARCH
Research Overview
I started by observing how people interacted with posts that were about food/drinks or in general about a place that they hadn’t been to yet. I was able to categorize them into two main buckets:
Journey maps for User A and B while discovering new places on Instagram
03. DATA FINDINGS
The highlights of my user research that shaped my design phase were:
1. Users naturally clicked on the location tagged in a post to check out more pictures about the place they were interested in. However, not many clicked on ‘view information’ to get more details.
2. Users left the platform to read reviews if the post in question was a restaurant or a cafe.
3. Users made note the location of interest on their notepads/notebooks/google maps.
With these points in mind, it was time to hit the whiteboard.
Current flow
The current flow takes the user to a screen where more posts from the same location are listed. There is a ‘View Information’ tab which when clicked, gives the user some additional information about the place.
Existing flow when a user clicks on a tagged location
There is clearly no way to 'save' these places on Instagram for the user.
04. IDEATION & DESIGN ITERATIONS
I began by identifying the gaps with the existing design, considered the user pain points and quickly put down a rough sketch for a new flow. The new flow focused on modifications made on two important UX principles:
1. Learnability
Make it easier for users to learn about the new places that they just discovered.
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Navigation from post to the location info screen
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Presenting important information to the user
2. Discoverability
Make it easier for users to go back to the posts of places that they had previously shown interest in..
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Retrieve the saved posts easily​​
4.1. Low-fi prototypes - Iteration 1
Wireframe showing the highlights of interaction and user flow when a user discovers, learns, and saves a restaurant while scrolling through his feed.
While that was the overall user flow, the MVP of this entire flow is the one that takes the user to the saved posts. And this screen was the one that took the most time to define too. The challenges on this screen are:
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The user might not remember what post he/she bookmarked(recognition vs recall)
2. Sorting the posts to make it easier for the user to discover
3. Giving enough information for the user to spot the place he/she is looking for
To decide this, I wireframed a few designs to validate it with the users.
Design 1
Pros:
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Easy and quick to spot the post
2. “Is consistent with the existing design” — Aparna.
Cons:
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A user might not remember what the saved post looked like
2. "Might not be helpful because the user will just google it" - Sharath​
Design 1: A grid of all the places saved in that location
Design 2
Design 2: (L-R) A grid view of the saved posts, a list view (default) of the saved locations sorted by recent additions, a location-based sorting which points out the places in the user’s vicinity
Pros:
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“I get the picture and the name. That will help me remember!” — Deepika
2. "I get to see the ones that I saved around me. This is super useful” — Sharath
Cons:
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What if I still don’t remember the place on looking at the list view?” — Neha
4.3. Mid-fi prototypes - Iteration 2
With the feedback that I had gathered, it was time to chalk out the entire flow and refine the existing flow by making changes to incorporate the feedback. I divided the entire flow into three:
1. A user discovering, learning and bookmarking a place he/she newly discovered — Flow A
Design highlights
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Star rating is shown upfront along with cuisine and distance (gathered from User Research that this is the most important deciding factor for users).​​
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'View information’ changed to ‘More information’ now that the user knows he can expect information like rating.
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Top reviews about the place are highlighted (User Research showed that most users left the platform to read reviews and look at menus through other apps).
Flow A — The discovering, learning and bookmarking flow
2. A user recollecting information about the bookmarked place — Flow B.
Design highlights
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Posts categorized for the user — The posts saved by the user are automatically categorized based on patterns of location/types of posts etc. Technically this would require machine learning algorithms to train the system and sort them into the appropriate categories​
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'Default list view — The saved posts in a particular collection are listed with enough details: visual cue(photo), textual info (name, cuisine, and rating) to help the user recall the place he/she’s looking for.​​
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Map view (for easier 'around me' searches) — The saved posts when viewed on the map view would automatically give a location-based view where the saved places around the user's location would be highlighted. This would be a helpful '...places around me' search.
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Flow B — The recollection flow
Map view
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The different views are presented to the user when he clicks on the saved collection. The default view is the list view (as shown above). The other two views are shown below.
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Saved collection view variation (L-R): Map view of places around the user's location, zoomed view with the saved location picture (visual cue to help recall tagged location), Grid view of saved places in the collection.
3. A user informing others about the place (giveback) — Flow C
Design highlights
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Frequently occurring reviews are highlighted (e.g., gnocchi, shrimp cheese pasta).
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'Reviews from a fellow followers/followee are highlighted (Users tend to trust opinions about people they know more than that of strangers).​
Flow C— The giveback flow
Since reviews are a deciding factor for the user, it was essential to provide a way for a user who newly discovered the place to voice out his opinion too and leave a review. This, in turn, would also help increase the accuracy of the rating and recommendations.
05. USER FEEDBACK
I tested the mid-fi prototype with the users by just giving them the task scenario and observed how they went about using the prototype.
Task scenario
You have just seen a museum on your friend's post that you would like to check out the next time you are in the city. How would you go about doing that using the prototype?
Highlights of user testing
1. "... I have been saving where the restaurant is tagged via Places and adding it to a collection that I manually created as a way of bookmarking new restaurants that I want to try across the globe. This makes it much easier". - Rachel
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2. "...I actually do this whenever I'm traveling to a new place. I like the fact that I can see the ones around my location. Makes sense especially when traveling" - Joel
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3. "What if I want to create a collection for myself and not let Instagram do it for me?" - Neha. *It was not apparent to the user that they could create a collection too*.
06. FINAL PROTOTYPE
The main objective of this redesign was to provide an easier way for the user to discover new places and curate them without having to leave the platform. Check out the following interactive prototype to see how these flows were tied together.
07. NEXT STEPS
KPIs
How would I measure the success of this project?
1. For businesses restaurants, cafès, local attractions, etc,) with an Instagram presence (having an account), the increase in the #of followers should be a good reflection of the feasibility of this flow.
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2. Increase in the #of reviews for these businesses should be a good indicator of the feasibility as well
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3. Increase in the #of search occurrences and/or increase in the #of tags in posts or stories.
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4. Increase in the general #of views for the tagged location.
Further feature additions
1. Recommendations
Based on the data that we have gathered from the user’s curation, recommendations about new places in the city and/or places that might interest the user in a new city/country can be provided.
2. Filtering posts to show more about the place and less about the people
One problem that might arise out of this kind of discoverability is that most of the posts can be about the people and not about the food/ambience/about the place. And this might lead to user dropout. This can be eliminated by filtering posts that highlight the business more.