Instagram Hashtag Improvement
New hashtag suggestions for small business to
improve the exposure and more
Skills - User research, usability testing, prototyping, wireframing, and UI/Visual design.
Instagram is the new battlefield for small businesses.
If you want to do small business on Instagram, you need to use hashtags to attract more customers. Hashtags help you to improve the exposure.
What is Problem?
The existing Hashtag feature on Instagram is not efficient.
Our goal is to
Provide efficient hashtags suggestions to improve posts' exposure to bring more audience and promote the small business as a result.
Small business owners want different and diverse hashtag suggestions but share the same goal: promote the business
6 user interviews reveal
Third parties provide numerous useful hashtags suggestions for small businesses but money consume and hard to decide.
Competitive Analysis
Three main aspects and user needs the potential to improve.
Affinity Diagram
Why We're Great >
Varieties of hashtag performance suggestion
Why We're Great >
User preference of hashtags
User preference of hashtags
Minimum Viable Product
focus on the first metric
So we choose providing a variety of hashtags performance suggestions is our priority user feature, which is the most crucial feature to satisfy user’s key pain points to make their posts get more exposure, furthermore promote business in the end.
Hashtags’ engagements & Hashtags related to captions
These two hashtag suggestions best help small business users know the performance of hashtags and pick the most useful hashtags.
Get inspired in comments too
Users can get hashtags performance suggestions when they have a comment.
By Instagram Story, Introduce new feature to users
Following Instagram industrial standard to introduce the new feature in the story to users.
Hashtag suggestions alterate following user’s typing
Different Status
When the user typing the first word, ins suggests hashtags begin with the word. Besides providing how many posts include this hashtag, it also provides the hashtag's engagement level showing by the signal level.
When the user starts hashtagging, Ins suggests the most frequently-used hashtags first.
When the user is typing the next words, ins suggested hashtags change following the phrase.
When the user selects one hashtag from suggestions, the rest suggestions move up and fill the vacant space.
When the user taps the “Related,” ins would suggest hashtags related to captions and text the user writes about the post. Also, it includes the engagement level of the hashtag.
When the user typing the next hashtags, related hashtags change following all the words as well.
When the user typing the next hashtags, related hashtags change following the all words as well.
When the user picks all hashtags up to 30, Ins will limit the hashtags to no more than 30. Because when a post includes more than 30 hashtags. The exposure of the post will flop.
Four ideations of Low-Fi Prototypes to create a different solution
Follow the industrial standard
Iterations
It provides choices for users to see different suggestions.
It does not conform to the Instagram industrial standard and changes the existing information architecture and user flow of Instagram.
The filter provides the user opportunity to choose which suggestions they want and give varieties of suggestions
It changes too much the existing Instagram structure and leads the using load as a small-scale feature.
This version keeps the structure of Instagram
This design combines all hashtag performance suggestions, which will confuse users and reduce the readability and usability of the feature.
This design keeps the information architecture of Instagram and provides hashtags related to captions separately, which is clear without change the existing popularity suggestion.
We pick this one because it follows the Instagram industrial standard without changing IA and provides new features keeping the readability and usability.
User testing
After user testing, make a more readable UX design
Exsiting Instagram hashtag suggerstion
New feature and new design of Hashtag suggestion
Users do not understand what is the meaning of click.
Replace “clicks” with “Engagement” to express the direct meaning of the new hashtag suggestion. Use the icon “Signal” to show a different level of engagement.
Users have not used to the way the meaning of the hashtag shows here.
Instead of moving to another page, users can tap the Information Icon, and the meaning of this hashtag will drop down, which is easy to adapt and use.
Takeaway
Design is the process of exploration and decision. Use the logic to define the MVP and provide iterations of solutions.
We could not avoid conflict when coordinating with others; significantly, everyone has a different perspective. Still, we could be the team player with positive energy to empower the whole team to approach a better design.