All eight participants unanimously agreed that the revised design greatly improved their experience with the "hiding and unhiding a friend's story" feature and may boost their usage frequency.
Adapting the double diamond is to build a framework that will handle the usability issues and find ways to solve them.
I invited eight young professionals, ranging in age from 25 to 30, and divided them into three groups. I observed the experience of using the story feature in each group.
Frequently creating stories
4 participants
At least once a day
Intermediate creating stories
2 participants
1 ~2 times a week
Rarely creating stories
2 participants
Every 3~6 months
The success rate seems to be satisfactory. However, most users have been using Instagram for a long time and are already accustomed to certain features that may have initially annoyed or frustrated them. To gain a deeper understanding of user experiences, I conducted interviews to gather more insights.
I used an affinity map to group similar insights together in order to identify the most common issues that users had.
I can't customize the hiding function in story.
Where can I hide this story from people?
It’s hard to find the hiding function. Can I hide the friend before I publish?
Forget to unhide friends.
I analyze three elements which are the task criticality, the impact, and the frequency. These three elements came out of the number of severity. Therefore, I found the most critical usability issue, which is “Hiding and Unhiding Story”, the top priority of the development.
According to the research above, the primary problem would be the feature of "Hiding and unhiding story from friends." Here is some data and user journey map to provide a clear context.
Use case 1: Hiding story from
Most users came to this page first to find the access, but none of them used the setting icon on the right top corner to hide a friend.
Use case 2: Hiding story from
Users went to the setting, and tried to find it in other categories such as "block an account", "close friends," etc. Some of them succeed, others fail.
Use case 3: Hiding story from
There are two frequently users hiding their friends after they post a story.
Use case: Unhiding a friend
With no previous story, there's only one flow for the user to unhide their friend, which is the flow in use case 2.
Make the solution specific.
I created three flows to solve the problem based on the different use cases.
Before
After
Users often find it challenging to locate the function to hide friends when creating a new story.
Despite the presence of a setting icon in the top right corner of the create story page, users have difficulty finding it. The process to hide friends requires multiple steps, and even frequent users of the function prefer to hide friends after they have already published their story, which they find inconvenient.
I have made the story setting function more intuitive by placing it on the edit story page, allowing users to hide friends before they publish their story.
Before
After
Before
After
Users often forget to uncheck the hiding function.
Many users report frequently forgetting to uncheck the hide function after hiding a story from friends, causing all stories to be hidden.
When users want to hide a story from friends on Instagram, they have two options. When viewing a current story, they can choose to hide the friend from just that specific story or from all stories. If there are no current stories, users can go to the "Hide story from" page in the Privacy section and only see the option to hide the friend from all stories. Additionally, users can view their hiding status on this page and reverse it at any time.
Before
After
The complex flow, "Settings-Privacy-Story...", often leads to frustration among users. Many are able to reach the "Privacy" section, but become confused by the subsequent options, such as "Hidden Words" and "Block an Account," which often divert them from their intended goal.
When searching for a specific item among multiple subjects, factors such as the "Name of the subject," the "Order of the subjects," and "Readability" play a crucial role.
Users often scan pages without thoroughly examining them, making the arrangement of subjects crucial. To optimize the subject order, I would need additional data such as the click-through rate for each subject. Additionally, I have used different background colors to distinguish categories, making the user interface more visually distinct and easier to read.
Iteration is crucial! Through another round of user interviews, all eight participants unanimously agreed that the revised design greatly improved their experience with the "hiding and unhiding a friend's story" feature and may boost their usage frequency.
As an UX designer, it's essential to anticipate that a feature may have multiple paths for completing an action, and not all users will necessarily follow the flow envisioned by the designer. Thus, it's crucial to take into account various scenarios and consider all potential flows in order to accommodate different user behaviors and facilitate the achievement of their goals."
After reviewing my last round of interviews, I realized they were not as thorough and insightful as I had hoped. To enhance my process in the future project, I will develop a complete flow and recruit a diverse set of participants, who were not included in the first round of interviews and usability testing, to assess the effectiveness of my proposed solutions in addressing the issues.
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