With its launch in 2017, Instagram shopping has been a way to make shopping less transactional and more immersive. When users see a product on a brand’s post, they can click on the product to learn more about it and purchase it. Despite having billions of users, there is still more room for improvement for this Instagram feature.

Challenge

Many people use Instagram for inspiration about what to buy, from clothing to portable projectors. The current flow of the process from seeing an item on a post to viewing the product and its details in an online shop contains unnecessary steps. When they see an item they like on the post, users have to look at the caption of the photo to see if the item is named or look at the tags in the photo to see what shop or brand carries the item. When they decide to buy it, they have to jump back to the brand’s official account to place an order, which is a disconnected process. So, I decided to improve the experience through a new design solution. The end product should improve the efficiency of the overall experience, while also adhering to UI principles of Instagram.

Disclaimer: This is a speculative project. I am not affiliated with Instagram. As a UX Designer, I took on this challenge because I’m a regular user of the app and wanted to provide solutions of issues I found.

Understanding The Problem

cURRENT flOW

Before getting into the redesign, we have to go through the current design flow to understand its issues.

Research

In order to get more details about the pain points of the existing shopping experience, I conducted user interviews with 6 participants. During the interview, I asked the interviewees to complete four tasks and narrate any opinions they had while completing the tasks.

Sketches

From the interviews, I got an insight into what issues to address for the redesign. Users wanted a more convenient way to find the products both through posts and the Instagram Shop. Below are rough sketches of solutions for said issues.

Redesign Mock Ups

Post Tags

In the current design, users can only tag the brand of the items, not the specific item. Not being able to tag the actual product leads to users having to do more research on their own, which adds unnecessary steps. By letting any account tag the product, other users can easily look more into the product. In the new design, anyone with an account can tag both the brand page and the specific product.

List View

On pictures that have tagged items, the list view only lists the items that are in the photo. It also does not have any accounts that are tagged. The whole list also covers up the whole screen. With the new design, the list only takes up about half the screen so the users will have the picture in the background for reference of what item they are looking at. Products as well as tagged accounts will be visible in the list view.

New Features

With the current design, there is no option to tag products in stories. By being able to tag products in stories, users and brands are able to increase the exposure of the product.

There is also a new flow from post to viewing the item in the Instagram Shop. Currently, regular users are not able to tag the item in their posts. The redesign gives the users an option to do so.

Takeaways

If this were a full functioning prototype, I would do more usability tests to find out if the new designs and new features were an adequate solution to the issues. With the feedback, I can make adjustments to the design if necessary.

I would also continue looking into why only shops can tag products and not normal users. For purposes of this project, the user was the main concern, but getting the full background of why only verified brand accounts can tag items can possibly lead to another redesign.