Helping teens celebrate their milestones and friendships on Instagram Stories
Role
Product designer
Team
Jennifer Ng (UXR)
Tony Liu (PM)
Skills
Product thinking
Interaction design
Visual design
Prototyping
User testing
Timeline
12 weeks
The Problem
“As a teen, I am looking for new ways to hype up my close friends. I want to be able to share a public display of affection that honors and celebrate them.”
TL;DR
Today, teens on Instagram are becoming more creative, finding new ways to shoutout their friends on special occasions like birthdays, achievements, and milestones. The culture of celebration on Instagram Stories often involves shoutouts from friends across different social circles, with multiple reposts by the individuals being celebrated.
In this project, I led the design process with these two questions in mind:
How might we elevate existing tools? We should upgrade our current tools to help teens create more personalized and visually engaging content directly within Instagram Stories.
How might we make celebrations feel more collective? We should allow for entire social circles to come together and amplify their friends’ special day collectively.
The Research
The close friends that teens make are an integral part of exploring and expressing their identity. We need to make it easier to co-create a collective identity together and surface their shared memories.
Displays of close friendship create opportunities to connect with new friends.
Today, Instagram helps teens connect and display friendship bonds through sharing. In fact, teens love it when they’re included in their friend’s stories. When teens are “included” in a shared moment, they not only feel good, but have increased feelings of closeness.
Teens want to make their friends feel good, so they find ways to show love. Hyping up friends is predominantly about showing support and signaling agreement. But it’s also about inviting others to make new friends.
Showing support: Teens want to publicly display how great their friends are.
Signal agreement: Resharing a feed post in stories amplifies a shared interest and demonstrates a consensus with the topic.
Making new friends: By hyping a friend, story producers hope that their followers will eventually take interest in that friend.
The Solution
Phase 1: Visual Redesign
How might we provide a more expressive way for teens to celebrate their friends?
I was assigned a backlogged sticker project that had been initiated by a previous designer and was tasked with improving and bringing it to completion.
Phase 2: Concept Rebrand
How might we differentiate this new sticker design from the existing @Mention sticker?
Next, I rebranded the feature from "Expressing Love" to "Shoutouts" to create more room for versatility.
To align with the new feature name, I expanded beyond the original floating hearts and the theme of "love." Maintaining design consistency, I repurposed existing assets from Instagram DMs and developed three themed sticker variations that can be used for a variety of occasions.
Phase 3: Feature Evolution
How might we make celebrations feel more collective?
Lastly, I evolved the Shoutouts sticker project into an entirely new social Stories experience.
This new evolved project is called "Flashmob" — a sticker for Instagram Stories that introduces a unique way to celebrate friends through creating a collective experience.
Intuitive Initiation: The feature begins with a user posting a celebratory Story for a friend, using the "Flashmob" sticker. This could be for a birthday, a special achievement, or any occasion worth celebrating.
Encouraging Social Engagement: The sticker serves as an interactive prompt, inviting other followers to contribute their own celebratory posts by tapping on the "Flashmob" sticker — encouraging participation by lowering the barrier to entry.
Building Anticipation and Surprise: The celebrated friend is kept unaware of the ongoing "Flashmob" until it’s complete, introducing an element of surprise. This intentional delay in visibility enhances the emotional impact when the friend finally views the collective celebration.
Streamlined Sharing Process: Once the Flashmob is revealed, the celebrated friend sees all contributed posts in one place. They can reshare the entire collection as a single, cohesive Story, rather than dealing with fragmented, individual reposts.
Toggle to switch from “Shoutout” sticker to “Flashmob” mode
Early sticker design explorations
User Test Feedback
Teens had fun with Flashmob!
Overall, we received very positive feedback for both products, 'Shoutouts' and 'Flashmob.' Users liked how Shoutouts felt like a more elevated version of the @Mention sticker, agreeing that it would feel special to have it used on their celebration day. However, teens showed much more excitement for Flashmob. They agreed that it was tedious to repost every individual celebration story, saying it often felt too 'spammy.' They were particularly excited about the surprise aspect of Flashmob and thought it would be really fun to celebrate their friend collectively under a single sticker.
Key Takeaway
I learned how to effectively manage feedback from both designers and cross-functional teams.
During the project, I was fortunate to have the support of an incredibly talented design team on IG Stories, along with my XFN team. I was constantly iterating, taking my project to crit sessions almost every other week, and providing weekly updates to my XFN team. The feedback I received was diverse and often scattered, but it taught me how to effectively manage input from multiple perspectives, allowing me to refine my designs without losing control of their direction.
KIN
