Instagram “Categories” Feature

“Categories” is a proposed new feature for Instagram, which allows users to organize accounts by their chosen groups.

This feature was created to overcome the newsfeed algorithm challenges, where more “suggested” or “recommended” posts are showing up in a user’s newsfeed, and less posts from people that the user follows.

I sought to find a solution that would work for both the users and Instagram as a business.

This concept project was created as part of my Masters in Digital Product Design program at Parsons.

Project timeline
8 weeks
Nov-Dec 2020

Deliverables
User research
UX/UI Design
Prototyping
Copywriting

Solo project

Figma Prototype ↗

Challenge

Introduce a new feature to an existing app.

App of choice: Instagram
Why: The huge popularity of social media, and Instagram in particular made it an exciting challenge to research user pain points, find an opportunity space and introduce a new feature.

Process

Problem discovery

Before figuring out what new feature I should bring to Instagram, I wanted to find out how users felt about the current version of the app, and what some pain points might be.

I started by reading through the Apple App Store reviews. A lot of the pain points in the reviews were related to the Newsfeed feature.

Finding an opportunity space

Through user interviews, I validated the pain points and found an opportunity space. This was my favorite part of the process—really digging into what the users thought, and what their pain points were.

Method
1:1 interviews with existing Instagram users

Research question
How does a user feel while scrolling through their Instagram Newsfeed?

Deciphering common pain points

Figuring out common concerns would help me provide a solution that reached the demands of a wider audience quicker.

The primary user interviews made it clear that:

Users became really passionate talking about the newsfeed, and had a lot of pain points with the system; particularly around the fact that they did not feel that their feed was curated to their liking.

Balancing business needs

Newsfeed is an integral part of Instagram.

3 of the 6 “Key Features” regarding the Newsfeed are about advertisements, so Instagram cares about showing users new content.

Goal

Create a more structured newsfeed that would allow Instagram’s users to see content that they wanted to see, as well as satisfy the Instagram brand/business objectives.

Chosen approach:
User Specified Categories

This idea was the one that users found the most valuable.

In this feature, Instagram would allow users to add entire accounts to specific categories. Users can then browse these specific ‘feeds’ of curated content.

Users were already cleverly trying to work around the Newsfeed pain point by creating multiple accounts to follow different types of content; what if Instagram could easily allow them to do this in one account?

Selection of screens from the mid-fi prototype. I followed Instagram’s UI closely to create a seamless testing experience.

Synthesizing the findings

To dig into the nuances of the problem I was trying to solve, I conducted 1:1 interviews to find out how users navigated the prototype.

Synthesizing user interview information with affinity mapping and 2x2 framework allowed me to quickly find issues in the solution that multiple people were mentioning, to then prioritize these issues in order to create a minimum viable product that was ready to ship.

One thing I learned
Users seemed overall enthusiastic about the feature but had some thoughts on additional aspects within it.

Solution

To solve this challenge and to create a viable solution that balanced both user pain points and Instagram’s business goals, I created a feature called “Categories”.

From the user’s perspective:
Categories would allow users to organize the accounts they followed by whatever structure they wanted. This meant that they could now look through just the content they wanted to see.

From Instagram’s perspective:
From Instagram’s standpoint, Categories would still contain advertisements and sponsored posts (as they are a big revenue generator), but these would be highly curated to the Category that they appear in. User testing revealed that users liked seeing sponsored posts as it allowed them with content discovery.

Reflections and next steps

I really enjoyed working on this project because of the challenge of its constraints — being an existing product, I had to be cognizant that the new feature does not cannibalize any existing features.

Another exciting challenge was to keep tightly within Instagram’s existing UI to create a seamless in-app experience. It is fun to create cool new designs, but just as important to be able to know how to fit within brand guidelines and existing UI / UX patterns.

Next on this project, I would also like to flesh out the Categories capability within the feature: How do Shared Categories work? How much sharing capability should they have? Do posts automatically get sorted into categories?