Redesigned Instagram: Putting the Social Back in Social Media
This ten weeks this past winter, a group of 28 Northwestern University students lived and worked in San Francisco as part of the Bay Area Immersion Program. For 10 weeks, we took classes about design, media and innovation with the goal of envisioning a better-designed world, which led us to wonder how we might improve the experience of social media. In our Service Design class, a group of friends — Emma Kumer, David Yoon, Pravika Joshi, Daniel J.S. Brown, and I — decided to redesign one of the most addictive applications on our phones: Instagram.
User-testing for something as universal as Instagram is difficult; it was impossible to set aside our own personal experiences with an app that’s become a part of our daily routine. Instagram is so ubiquitous, especially among our generation, that even asking other users for their pain points was difficult. Most people we spoke to loved Instagram — even though they admitted it took way too much of their time. Similarly, all five of us liked the app and wouldn’t consider leaving it, but we did want it to be less addictive. We wanted to leave the app happier than we entered instead of feeling sad, envious, or ashamed.
In speaking to others, there were a few trends that resurfaced again and again. It was only through the lens of extreme users — or non-users — that we were able to determine that the social media application designed to bring us closer actually brought us further apart. Instagram, through its efforts to bring us all hundreds of followers, widened our circles until we felt like we had a thousand acquaintances rather than a few close friends. Users didn’t care so much about the number of likes on a post as they did the content of the comments; they didn’t look at the number of views on a story so much as they read the replies. The information that people were looking for, again and again, was original messages from real people. Human interaction, not just taps or swipes. The social aspect of social media.
Our goal, throughout this project, was to put the “social” back in social media. We carried out extensive research, user observation, and information analysis, emerging with three refined features designed to optimize the app we already know and love Friends
In efforts to emphasize the parts of Instagram that foster a smaller community, we want to enhance the close friends feature. As it exists, an Instagram user can select a list of close friends from their pool of followers to allow them to see a private story. This private story and its accompanying UX features are displayed in green.
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