Instagram Audit

Our teams Product Specialist shared a very interesting finding one day:

The new Watch Together feature on Instagram was perfect!

• Watch Together on Instagram: 0 user reported issues/bugs

• Watch Together on Messenger: A steady stream of user reported issues/bugs.

  Something didn’t add up.

Hypothesis: There is a problem reporting a problem

I went through the steps a person might take to report a technical issue on Instagram. In my first attempt I hit a dead end after 4 clicks.
When I finally did discover the happy path to report a bug it was much worse that I would have imagined.

Conservatively it took me about 16 clicks to report an issue on Instagram.

What I found:

• The ‘Something else’ experience is broken

  • Search feature consistently returns ‘no results’ for known features and terms.

• Steps 1 and 2: Starting a bug report from the user’s profile page is unintuitive.

• Steps 5 and 6: The term ‘Report’ is vague and open to interpretation. ‘Report’ can refer to a person, content, or a technical issue.

• Steps 8 and 9: The navigation UI for the screenshot feature is obscured by the UI banner that turns the feature off resulting in mis-taps which turn off the feature when a user tries to navigate to the screen they wants to take a screenshot of.

• Steps 11 & 12: The number of steps it takes is report a problem is not realistic.

What we did —

Understanding the difficulties of reporting a problem gave us a pretty clear understanding of why we weren’t seeing more feedback from users. We informed the Instagram product team of these issues providing a number of design and content recommendations for how to improve the ‘report a problem’ flow on Instagram.