I worked alone for this one-week project on the following brief: add a new feature on Instagram to consensually repost someone else’s story to your own, regardless if you were tagged or not.
Approximately two billion people use Instagram each month, and five hundred million of them watch stories every day (Hootsuite Instagram Statistics, Jan 2022). Stories is a widely used feature where one-third of the most viewed stories are from businesses (brands, artists, and medias).
Instagram does not allow to repost stories of people you do not know on their platform, forcing users to find alternatives like illegally recording or screenshooting the content to save on their own device without permission. Two issues can be raised here: the ease of sharing content on social media, and a lack of knowledge around what is copyright infringement.
Users on Instagram who actually use the repost feature are people with professional accounts. The content that they repost the most is from other brands, artists or medias, but they have no idea if they can do this legally.
“I usually repost content from competitors or artists I find interesting because this is easy, fast and cheap content. To be honest sometimes I record my own screen without asking the author […] I’m not sure this is correct or not.”
Artists and creators on Instagram often see their work reposted without their consent and with incorrect source or credits.
Content Creators and artists need a way to manage how their content can be shared on Instagram because they want to be sure that their intellectual property stops being at risk of getting stolen.
I believe giving them the option to give consent for their work to be reposted on Instagram will help them be more shared and valued online.
I tried to find the easiest way for Painter Pia to be able to manage sharing settings on her work. Few questions I asked myself:
Should this feature be available for her only or to the user who wants to repost her content?
Will the feature be available on the main menu or only when posting a story?
Should Instagram automatically inform users that they are reposting content from artists that are subject to intellectual properties?
I decided to go with a feature that would only be managed by Painter Pia. She is the artist and she should be the one having 100% customization power on her published work and intellectual property.
From the content creator posting its content online (1)
From Painter Pia’s view getting notified when another user reposted her story (2)
During mid-fidelity user testing, people intuitively click the settings icon on “Add to my story” screen rather than on the “share icon” directly on the “edit my story” screen. This is a pattern I implemented in my HiFi prototype.
With all UI elements added on the high-fi prototype, since Instagram is a famous mobile app and people are used to it, they intuitively tried to access the feature through the settings icon on the “edit my story” screen (vs. the picture selection screen during mid-fi testing).
I therefore made the feature accessible from two screens: picture selection and story editing. I kept the feature in the settings icon that already exist on Instagram since most of people are already used to it.
1ST user flow - Adding sharing options by the content creator
2nd user flow - Getting notified when someone reposts your content
Key success metrics we should look at after launch:
Number of workshop registrations vs. completed
Set goals vs. user’s evolution
