In Feb 2018, I took Intro to Digital Product Design, a course that teach students about product design in an industry setting and help them explore and design against a problem in a form of a case study. Over the semester, I finished a concept case study that focused on scheduling future posts to compensate for Instagram’s lack of support for timely posting things.
• Planned and conducted user research and identified key opportunities.
• Performed a series of market research and brainstorming sessions.
• Validated proposed solution with multiple iterations of interactive prototypes.
• Adhered to Instagram design system and Human Interface Guidelines.
Feb 2018 – May 2018
Solo Designer
Humans are visual creatures. We prefer to collect and interpret information via sight. By appealing to that visual nature, Instagram lets you become an artist. The app allows you to take a photo and turn into something magnificent. After few clicks, you can craft your own masterpieces and feel like a real photographer. While Instagram promotes aesthetic photo creation, it lacks an ability to experiment with posts and profile feeds. This prevents Instagram users from curating their own artistic worlds.
How might Instagram help users to experiment with posts? How might it provide an easier way to better curate users’ profile feeds?
1. People forget to post.
“I don’t usually keep track of things I need to post since I often have other priorities.”
2. People want to get many likes.
“I treat like as a sign of approval and empathy from my friends.”
3. People desire to look professional and sophisticated.
“I created a second account to experiment how my new posts fit in my current profile feed … everyone is an artist on Instagram.”
After several rounds of interviews, I found that Instagram’s lack of support for curating profile feed and timely posting things frustrate users.
People want to perfectly tailor their Instagram feeds but they have a hard time timely posting things and visualizing how posts will fit.
I recruited my friends, Eddy and Jungwon, as my brainstorming buddies. After exploring, we discovered six solution spaces: Scheduling Post, Notifications to Post, Removing Likes, Republish Past Post, Pre-Censor Post, and Experts Check Post Quality.
Analyzing six solution spaces by impact (i.e., how beneficial the feature would be for Instagram users) and feasibility (i.e., how difficult the feature would be for Instagram to generate), I decided on an opportunity with the highest impact & feasibility:
Scheduling Posts: How might we schedule future posts? How might we preview/edit/view scheduled posts?
Currently, Instagram lacks a scheduling post feature and users have to save posts as drafts for future publications. More than often, people forget to post on specific times. Users need to use a third-party app to aid this process.
I learned that Instagram users liked the intention of this feature and how it smoothly integrates into the current Instagram user flow for publishing a new post.
Scheduling post feature across different apps contain similar content and actions. Every app prioritizes date, time, and time zones.
Following insights from market research, I determined key elements to schedule a post.
After exploring various content requirements, I decided to include most essential components: Date and Time, Time Zone, and Schedule Post Button.
I realized that having a separate schedule post page is better than having a single page to contain every feature to reduce users’ cognitive overload.
I then moved on to medium-fidelity mockups, beginning with the entry point.
I explored different ways to present the Schedule Post button. I found that A was confusing to users since it is too similar to social media toggle on/off buttons. I thought C could distract users from tagging people, adding location as it deviates from Instagram’s current flow for creating a new post.
I ended up on B because it is light-gray colored to highlight scheduling feature from other cells and displayed in the final row to adhere to the current user flow.
I then explored different ways to design the most intuitive “Date and Time Picker” for the Schedule Post page.
I initially created a calendar date and time picker B that displays all days of the month and hourly times. After conducting several user testings with different prototypes, I realized that people want to choose times by minutes too. For weekly date and time picker A, people preferred an arrow button to choose time rather than manually inputting time.
I radically changed the design to C since it is easiest to use and takes the least amount of time to navigate.
After scheduling a post, users would expect a feedback to confirm that they have scheduled a post. How might we make sure that a user has successfully scheduled a post?
I tried to create a notification icon that fits into Instagram’s current icon system and clearly indicates “scheduled a new post.” I found that A was always clear to users while C’s date was hardly noticeable due to its tiny font.
Now we scheduled a post, what is next? As aspiring design gurus, we want to know how scheduled posts are going to fit in our profile feeds. We are inspired by new ideas and want to edit our scheduled posts. We want to know queues for our scheduled posts.
I pursued A as it naturally integrates into the current Instagram design system. The blue label clearly indicates the number of scheduled posts and acts as an entry point to the edit/view scheduled posts. The clock icon is located at the fifth column of the navigation bar. This allows users to easily preview scheduled posts without going over multiple steps. If a small clock icon is placed in between “Edit Profile” and “Settings Icon” as shown in B and C, it would be harder to click the icon.
I chose A to provide the smoothest transition from the current profile feed. This option felt the most natural since scheduled posts were faded out to differentiate them from current posts that maintained same brightness. Option C failed to address the need of how scheduled posts are going to fit in the current profile feed.
I decided B since users wanted to know specific dates and times for their scheduled posts. Users wanted to confirm their scheduled times when checking scheduled posts queues.
This is the UI Kit that I created from my product design process.
For product thinking, I found it was difficult to focus on the most important features to my people problem. Multiple solutions seemed all plausible and intriguing, but I needed to select only few of them. Under time constraints, it is best to identify and iterate on key features rather than tackling too many features.
For visual & interaction design, I learned most importantly that consistency matters a lot. Looking back, I was captivated by design ideas that deviate from Instagram’s design system. In the future, I will perform more iterations to demonstrate consistency throughout my design process.
1. Would users be able to schedule multiple posts at once?
2. Would users be able to delete multiple scheduled posts in queues?
3. What would be the best time to schedule posts? How can users determine that?
This is a case study for a project in Intro to Digital Product Design. I am in no way affiliated with Instagram. This article can be also found here on medium.