Team

Tiffany Adams, Bo Ju, Hang Su, Andrew Belmonte & Rosario Carrillo
DePaul University UX class project

My Role – User Experience Designer

Responsible for low-fi prototypes, charting, helped with testing, writing, and presentation work. Note: I illustrated and edited the user journey sketches for my portfolio version. Software: Photoshop, illustrator, PowerPoint, Word, and Sketch.

Purpose

Our purpose is to create the ability for consumers to shop online directly from Instagram. If you are familiar with Instagram and tagging photographs, you can see how this would be financially beneficial to corporations. Currently, in photographs, you can only tag people. With this new addition to the photo-sharing application, social media users will be able to tag the items in the photo that directs the user to the item on Instagram. Collecting this data will provide the study team with:

Exploratory Research

Scope

To explore the usage habit of people with Instagram.
To find out the what kind of posts attract people of different certain groups the most.
To find out the shopping preference of people.
To explore whether people desire a quick and easy shop link on Instagram.

Research Methods

Questionnaire
Interview

Our guiding research questions

Do people prefer to shop online or rather in a traditional brick and mortar store?
Would this feature only be used by a select group of Instagram users or is it something that will appeal to a large variety of users?
Do Instagram users really want the option to shop from within the app or do they just want to use the app to view photos?
Is this feature something that people would only want to use for finding clothing or is it something that they would also be interested in using to shop for other things they see on the app such as food, furniture, etc?

Exploratory Research Results - Shopping Via Instagram

Personas, Scenarios, User Journey & Prototypes

The primary persona in our case is the ordinary Instagram users who shop online and follow even purchase stuff through sponsored accounts in Instagram.

Scenario: Saw a nice phone case on Instagram, but should I buy it here. Sitting in a quiet lounge, on her late lunch break alone. She was just using Instagram like she normally does, such as scrolling down posts, liking picture, gaining some inspirations, getting updates about products, etc. She’s thinking about buying a case for her new iPhone.

Goals and Motivations

Want to see feeds that match my taste and provide me the Information about upcoming products and sales events.
Would like to see sponsored accounts' posts with cool ads.
Want the tag or link below a post to lead to authentic and secure online stores.
Went to find a way to organize or categorize the things I like.
Want the app to be authentic photo-sharing place.

Frustrations/Paint Points

Many pictures are highly edited, which makes it not look like real life with natural lighting. Weird sites linked through Instagram posts make me worry about being hacked.
Some feeds that are not quite match my taste keep showing up.

Level of Instagram Expertise

10 years as basic performance on desktops and laptops (Microsoft Office, Adobe, SPSS, short film editing),
3 years Instagram daily basic user.
Uses only basic tasks, such as "like" a picture, post a picture, scroll down the feeds, check followers, search people, check followers.

Primary Persona

Jennifer Robinson
"I want the marketing posts on Instagram to be intriguing to see and safe to go in."

Age: 30

User Role: Active ordinary individual Instagram user.

Education: Master's degree in Liberal Arts

Background

She Is a staff member in Academic Affairs. She enjoys online shopping and also would like to check out the stuff in stores.

Personality

Slightly more of an extrovert.
More feeling, less thinking.
Slightly less intuitive, more intuition.
More judging than perceiving.

Lo-Fi Flow Prototypes - Shopping Via Instagram

Hi-Fi Prototype - Shopping Via Instagram

Structured Inspection

Heuristic Evaluation

Our method was Heuristic and followed the evaluation guideline that was based on Gómez, Caballero, and Sevillano’s (2014) heuristic evaluation checklist.

The evaluation was comprised of 38 questions – 26 were from a traditional checklist and the remaining 12 were from the mobile-specific checklist.

The Four Major Tasks
Our test results. https://goo.gl/YhcqfS

Go from Instagram interface to shopping site.
Add items to a wishlist on Instagram.
How to scroll, click and purchase an item on the shopping site.
Go from the shopping site back to Instagram app.

Usability Evaluation

We had 5 representative users participating with 5 tasks in the usability testing. All were online shoppers and used Instagram as ordinary individual users.

Procedure:

Before the test
Introducing, consent form signing, basic info recording.
Testing
Have each users to complete the task 1-5 using interface images individually. Observe carefully, take notes, and answer questions only
when asked.
After the test
Thank users and offer the rewards.

Analysis & Proposed Design Updates

Combined quantitative data and feedback on satisfaction, as well as the true observation record during testing, we discovered the following problems then developed some design update ideas:

Size of tags and size of images in wishlist is not appropriate.
Some icons are misleading.
The transfer interface from shopping sites to Instagram is too simple, needs more info in it.
No BACK button offered.
No HELP button offered.
Revise the tag size and polish icons to make them more recognizable and clear.
Add some info into the transition interface like breadcrumbs, view history, order summary etc.
Put a < on the interface from Ins to shopping sites.
Put a "i in a circle" on every interface to indicate information.