As a college student, I love finding new photos of food, fashion, and art. I, along with many others, could spend hours scrolling through my Instagram newsfeed, searching for inspiration. When I come across a satisfying picture, I often want to find related content. In order to do so, I tend to revert to extra platforms like Pinterest, Google, and Yelp. While Instagram fosters photo-sharing, there is little ability to search for related content within the mobile app. This is because Instagram’s search process is lengthy and ineffective.

How might Instagram enable users to search for related images? I hypothesized that if Instagram provided users an easy way to search for new content, users would spend more time on the platform and be less frustrated with their search results.

Understanding Why It’s Hard to Search

User Research

With this hypothesis in mind, I conducted user interviews to discover the pain points with Instagram searches. Some of the questions I asked were:

User Interview Questionnaire

What I learned:

Users want to discover new and related content on Instagram.

“I am always checking out the explore page and searching for artsy pictures of food and restaurants.”

2. Users have trouble finding exactly what they are looking for on Instagram.

“Some days, it’ll take me 30 minutes to find a picture that I can use for my project. I wish there was a way to filter my searches so there’s more things that I want to see.”

3. Users do not like captioning their photos with Hashtags.

“I never hashtag my pictures because it clogs up my newsfeed and makes my caption look long and messy.”

Identifying Personas

From these interviews, I created personas that represent the primary users of Instagram in order to understand the users’ unique needs, experiences, behaviors, and goals when using the application.