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Sustaining small businesses on Instagram.

Role

UX Designer / Researcher

Scope

User Research

Prototyping

User Testing

Timeline

8 weeks

Collaborators

Julia Chu, Nicolette Shin

Overview

For our HCI class, my team and I chose to explore finding ways to sustain businesses during the pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted businesses nationally; and small businesses have taken the biggest hit. As Instagram grows with its marketing potential, it has expanded its features to be used for online shopping. Thus, we decided to focus on Instagram, a multifaceted platform with over 1 billion users worldwide.

How might we further extend Instagram’s Shop feature to increase the discoverability of small businesses and local services?

Research

User survey
(15 responses)

Small business survey
(3 responses)

Small business interview
(5 responses)

  1. Survey customers’ experiences involving shopping online and how do they find local or small businesses to support
  2. Survey business owners to gauge how they use Instagram to promote their business and what they want to see from Instagram Shop
  3. Interview select business owners to build upon their goals. We reached out to these business owners via Instagram
  4. Test out the app’s features ourselves and directly observe users navigate through tasks (i.e. finding a local restaurant’s account, booking an appointment, etc)

Findings

  • It is difficult to compete with larger businesses that have the ability to promote and use the "Shop" feature.

  • Service-oriented businesses have less opportunities for display as the "Shop" feature is for selling products.

  • It is difficult to handle many direct messages as a Instagram business owner, especially with the current system.

User Personas

Between customers and business owners, we decided to focus on a universal customer experience while designing. Based on our survey and interview results, business owners have unique experiences on how they run, especially services. Nonetheless, they have a need for garnering attention on Instagram to get their business going.

Sketches

I drew sketches based on the issue we found with the messaging system. One business account user would lose track of commissions as they were the only person that ran the account and could not get back to a large amount of messages.

Wireframes

We created two versions for A/B testing:

(A) includes a banner on the user's home feed that brings them to a page to discover small businesses and a listed-style shopping view.

(B) includes a post that blends in with the user's home feed and a grid style shopping feed

User Testing

We each conducted user testing with the A and B prototypes (6 total) by giving short tasks with goals:

  1. Scroll through your feed to find a local tattoo shop. Message them.
  2. Find a plant shop and find a plant you would like to purchase

After A/B testing, we asked about each prototype and comparative questions.

We found that 2/3 users preferred the small banner over the post. One user specified that the small banner led them to the Instagram Shop landing page that featured a variety of local businesses, while the carousel of images was more limiting because it only directed the user to the businesses being shown.

In addition, 2/3 users preferred the list format, which allows the user to see both an image along with a short description that provides context for the product or service.

Discover small businesses

We ended up creating a more eye-catching "post" to support small businesses.

The tabs at the top allow users to filter through shops or services.

Book appointments

When browsing through services, users can read short descriptions about what each service offers.

When going to specific service, users can directly book appointments.

Easy shopping

On the other hand, we decided to keep the grid listing for products that are more visual.

Clicking on specific products opens up a description and a button to add to cart.

Reflection

This project encountered many bumps along the way due to our team's struggle to decide on the focus on the project such as which were our target users and which existing features of Instagram to utilize and iterate upon. I was able to make tough decisions through research and reasoning.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Guo and Instructional Assistant Nhu Luong for their guidance through this project. I would also like to thank my teammates for doing amazing work in our collaboration as well as being so fun to work with!