Instagram Notifications
User Research - Re-imagining the Instagram notification experience to reduce social media addiction.
Project Overview
Social media is undoubtedly an addictive force -- while it provides positive effects to the companies that create and benefit from them, it causes negative consequences to its users, who may unknowingly fall into a harmful cycle. This project aims to understand where this cycle comes from, and what changes we can provide to reduce some of the deceptive and harmful consequences of existing digital media. Specifically, we focused on design features in Instagram -- an app that has over a billion users (since July 2022), and is expected to continue growing in the next few years.
Project Type: Interaction Design Overview (College Course) - Group Sprint
Duration: 2 weeks
Team: Sharon Ren, Xiangqing Zhang, Xiaolin Ni, Deepti Sunkara
Role: UX Researcher
The Problem
With the rise of technology and social media, it can be incredibly challenging to put your phone down. This habit is often caused by deceptive design features that were seamlessly implemented — so that users are unable to notice what is causing their addiction. While social media itself may not be an issue, the problem arises when it begins to affect a user’s daily life, and keep them from completing their necessary tasks.
With all of these issues arising, we found ourselves working with a vast pile of data and research to hone down our ideas.
The Solution
Throughout our process, we identified one of the main problems to be the notification receiving process. Even when you put your phone down after scrolling for an hour, a simple ding will prompt you to return to the app (as if a trigger back to an addiction), and when you constantly receive those dings — well, you can see where I’m going with this.
Our solution is to alter the notification system so that users don’t receive every single notification of a like, a comment, or a share. Rather, they can specify a time that they set to review their notifications all in one (your “Daily Engagement”), thus reducing the amount of time spent scrolling through Instagram and reviewing it, spend less time on social media, and ultimately, improve life habits.
The Research
Before our initial research, we worked with an ecosystem collection map to determine what we currently know, as well as to identify any gaps in our existing knowledge.
What causes addiction to social media?
We then performed secondary research, utilizing academic journals and reliable sites as a way to fill in those gaps. From this, we discovered a few important notes:
Many different issues can be associated with social media addiction -- from increased struggle with mental health to building unhealthy habits.
There are so many design trends that contribute to social media addiction -- many we are so used to, that it seems so common.
1. Infinite Scrolling (there’s just so much content!)
User Interviews
2. Slot Machine Effect (scroll to refresh!! I want more!!)
3. Push Notifications (ding! ding! ding! ding! ding!)
With a better understanding of the information that we have collected so far, we began to work with user interviews to gain primary knowledge and research on social media addiction. Here, we focused our interviews to young adults (and more specifically, to college students of varying ages), and honed in on generalized internet usage, any habits that they have noticed since using social media (whether positive or negative), and their thoughts on the issues behind social media addiction and why it occurs.
We conducted four interviews, each of a college student (who are either graduate or undergraduate students). From these interviews, we identified key pain points that each student pointed out — some students noted the time consuming aspect of social media, as well as the “FOMO” feeling that users may get from seeing other posts. The interviewees specifically discussed the excess of content and notifications that gave users a reason to keep coming back to social media, even if they are trying not to use it as often.
Synthesis
With everything that we knew now, we completed an affinity diagram:
Here, we identify key pain points, insights, and opportunities that we might want to focus on.
Pain Point: Users notice that they are spending too much time on social media, but don’t realize it until after they get off the app.
Opportunity: Remove features that encourage validation (features that prevent addiction).
Insights: Insight: Many users are aware of social media addiction, and have agreed that to some extent, they are addicted -- but are generally unsure of how to prevent it.
Brainstorming
Through multiple iterations, we ultimately found that an idea we all felt garnered positive feedback was finding a feature that allowed users to stop from continuously checking social media -- notifications seemed to be a huge problem, especially for users who receive them for any type of engagement to them.
We started out with multiple scenarios, before settling on this one:
Jamie is a college student who participates in many extracurricular activities. Because of that, she is constantly in meetings with her teammates and club members. She is also an avid user of social media, and whenever she receives a notification, she immediately checks it, even if she is in a meeting. Her team members get pretty annoyed when this happens, as it seems as though Jamie is prioritizing her social media over the meeting. She ends up silencing her notifications during her meetings, but she realizes that she spends an unusual amount of time on social media when she checks on her notifications, and would like a way to mitigate the amount of notifications that she receives. She decides to turn off the option for notifications to appear, and ultimately spends less time on social media.
And the storyboard that built off of this scenario:
Wireframes
Low-Fidelity Prototypes
So, what’s the solution?
Well, you already saw it, but here it is again for good measure!
Reflection
With the research complete, we each created wireframes based on our discussion. After we each had a clear idea of what we thought was necessary, we came together as a group to combine our wireframe features, and ultimately, this is what came out.
Ultimately, this was one of my first experiences working on a sprint where my role was specifically tied to user research and ideation -- an extremely fun process to work with. While I had originally felt that my existence as someone who grew up with social media at my disposal, I knew almost everything that there was to know about it (including the causes of addiction), the research and synthesis process allowed me to understand that my perspective is one of many different thoughts and beliefs. Because this was a short sprint, my team was unable to work fully with the material that we had, especially with different iterations of ideas that we could flesh out and the feedback that we received to improve our current prototype. Looking forward, this is a personal project that I would like to develop and explore, as a way to balance the good for both companies and users.
Specifically, one feature to improve on would be the scrolling feature of choosing the time — with user feedback and testing, the biggest difficulty users had was figuring out how to set the time, so the immediate next step would be tackling this.