Instagram GO
(Academic, 3 week sprint)
Samuel Ho
Zubie Taupan
Cameron Lewis
Nasim Kamgar
Shelaam Janmohamed
UX Research
UI Design
Interaction Design
Branding Design
Miro
Invision
Figma
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Fresco
Instagram is one of the largest social media platforms in the world, and it is all about building communities and connecting with others. The endless scrolling and infinite content also makes it one of the world's biggest time-wasters. To motivate its users to be more active and push their creativity to the next level, our team designed an extension to Instagram.
We wanted the design to be inclusive, and able to generate interest from users and businesses alike. It needed to be a motivator to do things, but should also allow users to utilize its features without the need to be motivated.
Instagram GO is the motivator that you never knew you needed.
As lack of motivation becomes a growing issue during the global pandemic, people around the world became accustomed to staying in their comfort zone.
We knew that the competition was fierce going into the realm of fitness apps. To build a brand new platform attractive enough for users to change their routine is not a sustainable solution. By studying trending fitness apps like Nike Run Club, Strava, and Underarmor Run, we learn that community building and challenges were overlapping patterns.
However, most of these apps were not inclusive enough for what we wanted to do, and it was very limiting for community building. It also required new users to download another app to get started. At this point, we thought about building an extension for this purpose on an existing social media platform to generate for activity between users.
Our team needed find out how an average person gets motivated to achieve their fitness and creative goals. Aside from standard interviews and surveys, we utilized Instagram Stories to acquire results that are more focused on people who were already using a social media platform and are part of an existing community.
We had three key discoveries:
1) Being outdoors motivates people to be more creative.
2) Photography motivates people to go outside more often.
3) Competitions, challenges, and prizes incentivize people to reach their goals
With the data we compiled, our team concluded that having a challenge or adding incentives often helps people commit to goals, both in terms of fitness and creativity.
People are largely lazy, which leads to procrastination and unachieved goals. There's an opportunity to keep users motivated by tapping into the sense of community and the competitive nature of human beings, in turn providing moral support to users, potentially generate a whole new stream of content and providing businesses a brand new method of marketing.
During our research phase, we already knew that building a brand new platform for this purpose was not realistic. We would have to build extra bells and whistles into our tool in order to "steal" users from competitors.
This led us to begin brainstorming an extension for Instagram, a social media giant that:
- has a gigantic user-base including businesses that regularly advertises their products
- implementing challenges and prizes would be great for businesses to market and incentivize participants
- promoting creativity would not feel forced, as opposed to a regular fitness app
- is all about building communities and bringing people together
- is a photo and video sharing platform
We started asking ourselves "how might we" questions to begin the brainstorming process for the features of our extension.
1) How might we motivate physically active users to be more creative?
2) How might we motivate the less active user base to be more active?
3) How might we allow businesses to market their products while trying to motivate there users?
4) How might we design the extension to be inclusive for users who don't need motivation ?
We utilized a feature prioritization matrix to determine what we wanted to implement as the MVP of our design.
By placing our ideas on the feature prioritization matrix, the vision of our extension to Instagram seemed more clear. We decided based on the green zones of the matrix to prioritize the features we wanted to implement.
Before rushing into sketches, we thought deeply about how users would interact with our extension. By constructing a user flow, we were able trim down on the unnecessary steps for a user to join a challenge.
A user flow based on how Instagram users would join, complete, and share a challenge.
When we began sketching our design, we knew that we needed to keep the overall aesthetics of the app. However, we needed to GO elements unique to give visual queues to the users that these elements belongs with the new feature.
A crucial design decision was made as well, such as moving the shop feature to the top right corner of the app. There were two reasons for this decision.
1) All online shopping carts are on the top right of the vendor's website, so we feel that this is more intuitive for Instagram users.
2) The shop feature did not generate enough attention (from our interviews and testing) to warrant a spot on the main navigation bar.
To help users get motivated both in fitness and creativity, we chose to implement two types of challenges. Public challenges allow businesses to market their products and incentivize their events for promotion. While private challenges can be created by users to invite their peers for a little in-house competition, while keeping each other accountable for completing their goals.
Sketches on the layout of Instagram GO.
We received positive feedback for the overall structure of the sketch wireframe. Users knew how to interact with the wireframe, but overall were quite reserved in judgment due to the design being in the infant stages.
We backed up our design decision to create unique elements for GO, such as the rectangular feeds for challenges to differentiate from normal feeds.
Icons were carefully chosen to properly represent the feature that we implemented.
A hold + release interaction was implemented on the GPS marker to activate the camera for quicker snapshots.
Mid fidelity prototype of Instagram GO.
By conducting another round of tests for our mid fidelity prototype, we discovered that some visual queues were not performing as well as we thought. The progress bar was hard to find on challenge screens, and we also found research stating that progress bars were psychologically harder to complete than other progress tracking elements.
With this piece of data and research, we promptly adjusted our progress bars to progress rings because the circular rings were more welcoming and seemed virtually easier to fill.
Our testers also guided us to refine some of our icons, as some of them were not conveying the proper message that we intended.
The GO feature needed a colour to stand out from the rest of the dominant features of Instagram. For example, normal stories have red rings around a user's profile picture. Whereas close friend stories have green rings. We decided to go with a blue ring to contrast the more common red story rings. This colour can be seen throughout the GO extension.
This story feed would provide onboarding tutorials for users logging into Instagram first time since the launch of the GO extension.
To seamlessly launch of Instagram GO, an Instagram official story was posted (a common practice for Instagram) with a blue ring to help users familiarize with the new extension.
Users have the freedom to choose between joining public or private challenges, and just free roaming.
Instagram GO will show you how to get to the point of interest of your choice.
Want to capture the moment? Use the shortcut we carefully crafted into Instagram GO.
I remember brainstorming ideas (around 2018) to allow people to search nearby points of interest for creative photography prior to Instagram GO. I just wanted to build something that I could use after dinner to just use spontaneously. At the time, I never thought about utilizing existing social media platforms. I only wanted to create my own product, change people, and have them adapt to my product.
But that isn't user-centric design.
Instagram GO was a project allowed me to finally bring a vision to life. I was fortunate to be in the same team as my peers because they opened up more possibilities to an idea which was otherwise narrow-minded. This was truly my first experience where everyone in the team was passionate about the project, and it was just a treat throughout the journey.
