Measuring User Experience — An Instagram Case Study
“What you have here is a high-quality presentation and project. This can easily be an exemplar for how to communicate design visually and in written form. Central to communicating design is the narrative/storytelling approach you have here. You hit all three of the qualities that make an effective design presentation effective: visual communication, written communication, and narrative/storytelling.”
— Oscar Lemus, Assistant Instructor, Experience Design
This is a project to quantify user experiences demonstrated by measuring the user experience of uploading a photo on Instagram. If you’re like us, you’ve probably become hooked on Instagram since quarantine life has taken over. We’re trying to understand how to measure the experience of posting a photo on Instagram. To do this, we created a survey split into four phases namely, 1) taking a photo, 2) selecting a photo, 3) sharing the photo and 4) feedback on the photo. We received a lot of responses from a target user group of people ages 22 to 28. With their feedback, we were able to measure the importance and difficulty of each phase. Through these surveys, we have tried to derive qualitative experiences from the behavior of quantitative data and created an Experience Map to place different experiences based on the measure of the importance and difficulty.
Overview
Problem Statement
The goal of the project is to measure the user experience of uploading a photo on Instagram. We have used quantitative measures like importance and difficulty from a scale of 1 to 3 to derive a few qualitative experience measures. Through close question and open question surveys as well as usability testing, we were able to closely analyze the process of uploading a photo and present our findings.
Phases of posting photos on Instagram
To effectively measure the importance and difficulty of positing a photo on Instagram, we split up the process into four stages,
Hypothesis
D/I Experience Matrix
With the process being broken down into 4 essential phases, to reach any sort of conclusion about the whole process, it was necessary to visualize where all of them fit together and how they’re co-related. We mapped the two indicators — Importance and Difficulty of a task onto axes.
We were able to generate a predictive model of the experience if the data gave us a location on the graph. The data that we got from each phase would correlate with on of the points on our matrix that could give us an approximation of the experience.
Survey
The survey sent out received 71 responses. Our idea was to keep the survey extremely simple, and something that wouldn’t take more than 2 minutes. Therefore, for every section, we just added 2 questions,
- How difficult is the phase?
- How important is the phase?
This survey generated important results, and helps us map out a user experience journey that is shown in the later sections.
Results
Phase 1: Taking a photo
From the data, we can see that taking a photo is important to people and moderately difficult to do. This reveals that the experience of is fairly challenging to users since the data leans toward difficulty. However, since this is also considered an important activity to most users, we can say that they are highly engaged with taking a photo and find it to be an exciting experience.
Phase 2: Selecting and Editing a photo
From the data, we can surprisingly see that the majority find the process of selecting and editing a photo to be really important, and they also find it moderately difficult to do so. This reveals that the task is challenging. The fact that majority of the people think it is important, shows that it keeps the user’s attention — making it engaging.
Phase 3: Sharing a photo
The data reveals that majority of the users clearly feel that the process of sharing a picture is definitely not a low priority, but at the same time users feel that it is a relatively easy task. The task can be done with ease and is motivated by self assurance. This phase is seamless because it can be completed automatically and without a lot of concentration.
Phase 4: Feedback on a posted photo
From the data we can see interaction with a photograph once posted is moderately important to most users but a majority of the users think it’s relatively simple to do so. This data when compared with the key shows us that most users see feedback as an unobtrusive process since it’s very low on difficulty. It’s also somewhat important so users feel secure and relaxed once their photos have been posted.
User Journey
We were surprised to find that selecting and editing a photo is the most important and difficult phase. This would suggest that the quality of people’s photos matter more than taking, sharing, or receiving feedback.
Throughout the process of posting a photo, importance is higher than difficulty at each phase. This meant that overall, posting a photo on Instagram is a highly unobtrusive experience.
Reflections
More numbers on a scale makes quantitative analysis of qualitative attributes much harder.
One of the biggest lessons we learnt while conducting the survey was that while measuring qualitative experiences, using more quantitative measures makes it really difficult to pinpoint exact experiential qualities. This is due to the very reason that the possibilities are endless, and huge number of user responses are required to make any conclusive analyses.
Quantifying an experience isn’t definite and will always be relative to the user.
We tried to use descriptive words and give them a scale to roughly estimate the experience of the user. The issue we faced was with giving the user a moderate or middle option on the scale. Creating an absolute scale with only extremes would have made it easier to measure the experiential qualities of the user flow. Although the accuracy would be low, the idea was to use this step to drive qualitative research. On the other hand the idea of adding more descriptive words and creating a more complex matrix might help with getting a more accurate understanding of the experience.
Measuring an experience is challenging because users can have a variety of different experiences for the same situation.
We tried to overcome this by identifying multiple measurements for the experience (such as challenging, engaging, excitement, etc.). We also looked at the overall majority of the responses to our metrics to get an overall picture of the experience at each phase. Even when we did this, we realized that our measurements have limitations. Our experience adjectives don’t reflect every single response, and interpreting the experience is not perfect.
Thank you for reading!
Team Members:
- Kaustubha Patil
- Zachary Gilbert
