In this speculative project, I wanted to enhance Instagram by incorporating mindfulness and mental health promoting features into their mobile app. My focus was on understanding the goals, pain points, and expectations of Instagram users in relation to mental health and mindfulness features. Additionally, I explored the potential benefits of these features in fostering a supportive and positive user experience.
I wanted to maintain feelings of validation and community interaction while hiding engagement metrics and reducing distracting notifications and suggestions. It was also important to integrate my new features without adding complexity or compromising the platform's aesthetics and user interface.
By conducting user research and extracting insights through research synthesis, I unearthed pain points users have in the platform and proposed practical solutions to promote authenticity and reduce comparison pressures. My ideation and design of the new Freeflow Mode lead to a prototype that testers found intuitive and seamless.
I conducted a competitive analysis to learn more about mental health and mindfulness features on popular social media platforms such as TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, and Pinterest. By researching and parsing the spectrum of features, I identified key insights about what other platforms are doing and where there were missed opportunities.
I interviewed 5 current Instagram users for my primary research. There was a lot of consensus around motivations, frustrations, and mental health concerns.
Using my competitive analysis and user interviews, I created the persona of Olivia Patel, a mindful Instagram user seeking to foster authentic connections through unfiltered content sharing. I broke down her motivations, pain points, and desires, which guided development of features that prioritize mental well-being and promote a more genuine user experience.
“I try to focus on connections that really matter, but end up comparing my life to curated ones that don’t show the full story.”
How might we ensure positive experiences and enhance users' well-being when they use Instagram?
How might we incorporate well-being, positive self-regard, and mindfulness into existing app flows?
How might we prevent users from leaving the app in a worse mental state than they arrived?
The project constraints included the difficulties of integrating new features seamlessly into a complex platform, conducting rigorous testing for the feature's effectiveness and potential bugs, and also attempting to meet an exceptionally short timeline.
From the sitemap, I predicted that finding where to turn on this new feature would be its own challenge. I started by diagramming a user flow for turning on this new "freeflow mode," and another mapping the altered flow for posting a photo.
Legend:
Scenario 1: Olivia is feeling a little down and would like to turn off some of the noise and enjoy the most calm and uplifting version of her feed, so she turns on Freeflow mode.
Scenario 2: While in Freeflow Mode, Olivia wants to post a photo.
Having diagrammed the user flows with the highest value to the project, I created low-fidelity wireframes of the Freeflow mode activation process and photo posting experience.
I wanted to make sure the icon and logo for Freeflow mode was in keeping with the minimalism of the Instagram brand, so I kept it very simple with a “water flowing” motif and used the Instagram brand gradient for my color palette.
With a clear vision of the user flows, I transformed the low-fidelity wireframes into high-fidelity mockups. These refined wireframes integrate seamlessly with the existing user interface while adding opportunities and encouragement for spontaneity, authenticity, and mental health resilience when sharing and browsing on Instagram. I then prototyped both flows for user testing.
View prototypeMy metrics for success were mostly met:
Three users felt that the existing Instagram UI makes it difficult to find settings, but because they knew where to find setting already, they could find Freeflow Mode easily.
Neutral or negative feedback I received was either about the limited scope of the test or about the existing platform — two commented that if Instagram didn’t push so many ads and suggested content and would let you have more control over the algorithm, there wouldn’t be a need for a separate mode.
None of the user recommendations for revisions were within the scope of the project, as they weren't directly related to the two user flows:
While there wasn't much I could do to address these within my existing flows, I did revise the prototype to include more paths that lead users directly to the Freeflow mode setting: clicking on the Freeflow symbol in any location, whether on a Freeflow "ad" in the feed or on the Freeflow badge next to a user avatar, brings the user directly to the Freeflow setting screen.
Through user research and creative design, I crafted an interface that prioritizes mental well-being and authenticity. This project allowed me to demonstrate my ability to address real-world challenges and incorporate mindfulness principles into digital product design.
I would have loved to create additional content for the feed to show both how the feature might be found via promoted content and the kinds of content that could be incorporated into the feed when Freeflow Mode is turned on.
