Case Study: Heuristic evaluation on Instagram mobile app
Instagram is a popular social media platform that allows users to share photos and videos with their followers. It was launched in 2010 and has since grown to become one of the most widely used social networking services in the world, with over a billion monthly active users as of my last update.
Instagram is primarily a visual platform, allowing users to share photos and videos to communicate their experiences, thoughts, and stories.
Overall, Instagram's significance lies in its ability to empower individuals, businesses, and communities to connect, communicate, create, and inspire on a global scale, shaping the way we interact with each other and the world around us.
Evolution of Instagram Designs
Heuristic evaluation is a method where evaluators examine digital products using a set of guidelines called heuristics. It helps identify usability issues and areas for improvement in the product’s design and features. The goal is to make the product more user-friendly and enjoyable by providing valuable feedback to the creators. By following the suggestions from the evaluation, the app can become easier to use, more intuitive, and give users a better overall experience.
This article is the product of the UX challenge from uxuiopen and presents a heuristic evaluation of Spotify’s playlist creation and management process, based on Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics. Nielsen’s heuristics provide a comprehensive framework for evaluating the app’s interface design and interaction, helping us identify strengths and areas for improvement.
Evaluation Criteria:
There are 10 evaluation criteria based on Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics.
Visibility of System Status :
"The design should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within a reasonable amount of time."
Match Between System and The Real World :
"The design should speak the users’ language. Use words, phrases, and concepts familiar to the user, rather than internal jargon. Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order."
User Control and Freedom :
"Users often perform actions by mistake. They need a clearly marked “emergency exit” to leave the unwanted action without having to go through an extended process."
Consistency and Standards :
"Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing."
Error Prevention :
"Good error messages are important, but the best designs carefully prevent problems from occurring in the first place. Either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action."
Recognition Rather Than Recall :
"Minimize the user’s memory load by making elements, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the interface to another. Information required to use the design (e.g. field labels or menu items) should be visible or easily retrievable when needed."
Flexibility and Efficiency of Use :
"Shortcuts hidden from novice users may speed up the interaction for the expert user so that the design can cater to both inexperienced and experienced users. Allow users to tailor frequent actions."
Aesthetic and Minimalist Design :
"Interfaces should not contain information that is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in an interface competes with relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility."
Help Users Recognize, Diagnose, and Recover From Error :
"Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no error codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution."
Help and Documentation:
"It’s best if the system doesn’t need any additional explanation. However, it may be necessary to provide documentation to help users understand how to complete their tasks."
Here are my findings on this heuristic evaluation:
Visibility of System Status
When deleting an Instagram story, it shows the status of the activity stating "Deleting...", which helps user to understand the present course of action.
Showing the status of the action
No Update on the action leaving the user clueless
There is no feedback like "Changes saved" after the user updates their profile bio, it should precisely show the user what is being happening in order to mentally satisfy them.
Match Between System and The Real World
We can see the icons on the screen where it matches with the natural mental model of the user. An application or a technological entity should always speaks user's language and intuitive.
Icons like bell, compass, thoughts, stars etc associates with the user's mental model.
User Control and Freedom
Users should always have the control to approach where they want to go and it should be placed at right and feasible places. In depth, Fitt's law is applied here as it states "The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to size of a task"
Providing all the creative options
It provides all the possible options and creative ideas to the users within possible reach and if they want to leave the interface they've the emergency exit option as well.
Consistency and Standards
Instagram always uses the same logos or icons to maintain consistency within it's users to keep their platform moving forward.
Users can save the picture as well and also have the abilty to collaborate the saves with other fellow users as well.
Here, a user can just easily like the picture either by tapping on the heart symbol which is within the touching distance or by double tapping on the photo.
Error Prevention
If a user fumbles by going into a wrong option, there should be a warning from the interface to avoid doing a mistake which accidentally go wrong after the user changes their minds.
The interface must give a valid explaination and the explain about consequences of doing something which the user is not intended to do.
Recognition Rather Than Recall
The users can like a post or can save the post for their future reference inorder to recall the situation or moment and here this application denotes the liked post with an added color just to show the post has been visited or liked or checked. This actually minimizes the user’s memory load by making elements, actions, and options visible.
Giving the users an idea that an action has already been taken
Flexibility and Efficiency of Use
When a designer creates a platform, it always should be flexible to use and the user can't afford to spend more time for the action and it should provide the users to have all the possible options on the fastest reach as possible.
The users must be provided the services with minimal reach by being flexible as possible with all the options within two reaches.
Aesthetic and Minimalist Design
Instagram provides it's users to add music while uploading a post but it doesn't allow the users to edit the music clip once the upload is done whereas it is overlooked as a red flag in this design.
Here are the aesthetic designs of instagram
Help Users Recognize, Diagnose, and Recover from Errors
When a user is trying to search something and if it turns out to be having spelling mistakes or any error input, it will help the user understand about the error, providing alternative suggestions or actions. This enables users to quickly understand the cause of the issue and proceed with other options.
Error message to help users recognize the problem
Page helps recover the dissapeared stories after its 24 hour time period
It helps users to restore the stories which got archived in the past and can again work on it and help them access through those archived posts.
Help and Documentation
Instagram provides various forms of help and documentation to assist users in navigating the platform and resolving issues. Here are some resources that users can access for help on Instagram.
Instagram's Help Center is a comprehensive online resource that provides answers to frequently asked questions, troubleshooting guides, and step-by-step instructions on various topics such as account management, privacy settings, reporting content, and more.
Instagram publishes support articles on its Help Center covering a wide range of topics related to using the platform effectively and resolving common issues.
Instagram's community forums provide a platform for users to ask questions, share experiences, and seek assistance from other members of the Instagram community.
By leveraging these help and documentation resources, users can access the information and assistance they need to effectively use Instagram, troubleshoot problems, and make the most of the platform's features and functionalities.
Instagram's Help Center and community section
Conclusion
Through a meticulous heuristic evaluation based on Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics, we’ve delved into Instagram's management process, uncovering insights that shed light on its strengths and areas for refinement.
That’s all the results of the heuristic evaluation approach that I have done about the Instagram. Need to be underlined I did this case study to illustrate my approach to conducting a Heuristic Evaluation of a mobile application.
Thank you so much for reading!
