Snapshot Feature on Instagram

Snapshop Feature on Instagram

Social Media E-commerce - Image Recognition Technology

Based on my research, over 80 % of interviewees get their style inspirations from Instagram and they would like to shop style products on Instagram directly so I decided to create the snapshot feature on Instagram to let people search and buy products in an easy way.

Problem

If users find some style products that they want to buy on Instagram, they will search the similar products on Google by typing the keywords about the product or upload screenshots of the products to Google Lens or other visual search apps to search and buy those products. The buying process is time-consuming.

Goals

Adding a new feature to let users search and shop style products directly on Instagram, which helps to streamline the buying process for users and to increase in-app purchases for Instagram.

High Fidelity Screens

Prototype

Loading Animation

User-Centric Design Process

Focus on putting users at the centre of product design and development. It helps to understand users’ needs regarding the features of the digital products. User-centred design improves the user experience.

**UX Design Process**
The design process is interactive and non-linear. We need to keep validating the design solutions at every stage of the process.

**Hypothesis**
Based on the research I’ve conducted, instagram users and fashion lovers are our target customers and hypothesis is set up to guide the design direction.

Discovery Phase

Researching problems, framing key user needs and gathering evidences to validate design direction on what to do next.

Our target customers want to look nice and dress well everyday, but they are busy in work and life so that easy and fast shopping experience is needed.

To put ourselves into customers’ shoes, to feel how they feel, user stories and scenario analysis is built up to know more about how users’ shopping behaviors.

LiketoKnowIt and ScreenShop are popular visual search apps for shopping style products and they tends to suggest a wide range of styles for the users.

Google Lens and Camfind are other strong visual search apps and they do not just focus on searching fashion products.

Definition Phase

Collecting data from the discovery phase to define the key users’ pain points, user flows and design challenges.

SWOT is used to analyse where is the product in the market and what we can do better. Affinity map is applied to organise ideas and features by getting inspirations from competitors.

We work under constraints so we cannot create a perfect product at once. 2*2 matrix is helping us to focus on the product features that can bring the highest values to the business and users.

Ideation Phase

It is a creative process. Brainstorming a large quantity of ideas that the team can cut down to the best, most practical and effective one to address user problems and business goals.

To know more about how do users go through the shopping journey and analyse their feelings at every stage in order to provide possible solutions for their problems.

To have a bigger picture of how do users complete the shopping journey and navigate through the process by creating user flows and site map.

Prototype Phase

Presenting the complete idea of how the design will look like in the final result. Product team can streamline the design development process and important user interface elements.

To get quick feedback from stakeholders, users and other teammates, low-fi wireframes are designed to present the ideas initially and visually.

Design system is for reusing UI components then it can speed up the whole design process with consistency.

User-centric design process means data-driven. We are going to design a solution that can actually solve users’ problems.

User testing is a way to validate the design decisions and it can be conducted at earlier stage or at the end of the design process.

Reflections

In reality, design thinking process is not only interactive but also is messy and giant messy. Under time and resource constraints, sometimes, we might jump into the ideation stage immediately creating wireframes and prototypes in order to get quick feedbacks from the team so that we can get the urgent but low priority design task done within timeframe. To be successful, UIUX designers should able to clearly identity where they are in the design process and collaborate as well as communicate effectively with cross-functional teams and external users at the same time.

View more of my work

Product Design (UI/UX)

Graphic Design