Individual Reflection #2

During Week 4, my group became more certain of our choice of mobile asset - Instagram. I initially had doubts because I was unsure if there was enough opportunities to redesign it well as a designer due to Instagram being a large, established and popular platform. I voiced out this concern to my group during class. After class and after reflecting on that, I realised that we should not think of redesigning as simply the changes on the interface, but it also encompasses the underlying interactions, interaction flows or stuff like reducing the number of steps to do certain actions. This reminded me of a small change that Instagram made last time by changing the middle bottom navigation bar button from posting a Instagram post to scrolling Instagram reels. This brought about great dissatisfaction among many users. Hence, it made me realise that a small change can bring about huge impact as it disrupted the normal user flow and habits. This learning point could be brought into our project by reminding ourselves that we need to take note of users’ habits and the normal user flows. Rather than disrupting normal user flows, we should try to complement and improve on them.

We also made a survey and sent them out to our target users. While crafting the survey, I took very careful thought about the types of questions, phrasings and created questions while avoiding assumptive questions and leading questions. If any questions are not effectively phrased, I will politely suggest the changes to my teammates. I wanted to be very careful about confirmation bias and framing effect to prevent any potential influence our questions may have on the respondents. As we are still in the Discover phase in the Double Diamond model, I do not think that it is good to narrow down to any Instagram features yet without doing enough user research. Hence, I tried to guide my group into creating more open-ended questions that asked respondents about their expectations, feedback or impressions.

I do think that my group is on the right track and is progressing very well as everyone is able to contribute ideas effectively based on their own domain knowledges and experiences. I believe that our next steps are to consolidate our respondents’ response and gather insights from them. If necessary, I would push for my group to conduct contextual inquiries (CIs) as they would be good for our project. I have conducted CIs before in another module and I realised that CIs help to gain unsaid insights. Many times, users are not aware of some pain points that they have or actions that they do. Hence, observing them and asking them appropriate questions would be a good way to uncover those “unknown” insights. Not only that, it is very accessible for us to conduct CIs as we could easily ask any friends, whom most likely fit into our target group, and observe them throughout the day and when they use Instagram.