How would you improve Instagram stories?

Focussing on celebrities since they are the primary content generators and tend to attract most of the views. If I can improve their pain points it will have a downstream effect on a larger user base and thus overall user engagement goal.

Persona and pain points: Celebs across the world, they are tech-savvy, usually belong to metropolitan cities, want to post messages as stories to connect with fans, share and promote new content, also have to deal with trolls and abusers. Example - lady gaga, movie stars etc.

Key Problem Themes:

Connecting with fans
Dealing with abusers
Getting more quality fans and followers organically

Prioritizing problem

Focussing on 1 since it will help me have the biggest goal of improvement in engagement, abuse problem has already been invested in by FB so not much lift available there. 3 will also get solved indirectly if we solve for 1.

Potential Features

Fan Club and fan stories -
1. Similar to patreon, these fan club experiences will be published as special stories and visible to members of Fanclub. Fans will get exclusive access to content via stories or live AMA sessions with influences through live streams in stories.
Interactive filters and games
1. Allow celebs to play games with their fans. For example, playing a monopoly, pictionary, cards against humanity will really take the experience to the next level.
Stories store + Promote products and sale
1. Some fans may be interested in buying clothes or fashionwear endorsed by celebs. As a celeb you can tag the clothes you are wearing and place them in the FB marketplace where a user can buy clothes from.
Story creation helper
1. For new and upcoming influences, guide them with best practices of story creation. Ask them which user segment then want to target etc and based on that recommend the style guide, the filters, and lines to use to drive higher user engagement.

In order to prioritize these solutions, I will measure them along the following dimensions: 1. Impact on UX (reach of users, impact on FB mission, impact on user delight), 2. Engineering Effort

My prioritized list of features would be

interactive filter + games, 2. fan club (like Patreon), 3 - Story creation helper, and 4. Stories store.

The UX of interactive filter games would be:

Celeb will exclusively have access to certain games that they can choose to play with their fans.
They will start a live stream or post a story and users might get to join the games based on first come and first serve, or on a lottery basis. These games will be in an AR filter mode that users can play with.
Fans will play games in live video chat mode with the celeb and feel like they will be in the room with the celeb
There will also be a VR version of this - fans can experience these games in VR mode and feel more immersed with their celeb.

Success metric:

Primary

# of stories published per creator
# of DAU, WAU of viewers that engage with stories with interactive filter games
# of unique views per story

Secondary:

Impact on overall FB ecosystem
1. DAU, MAU for FB
2. ARPU

Saffana Humaira · Answer 2 · 2020-04-10T18:58:53+0000

Instagram stories were created so people can express themselves to their communities through ephemeral content. It aligns very closely with Facebook's mission of empowering people to build communities as a result. We can set the improving user experience and interactions with instagram stories as the goal.

When we try to segment Instagram Story's users, who come up with two essential stakeholders: the creator and the viewer. Since this is a two-sided engagement, and creators supply this with content, let's focus on the supply side, i.e the creators. Within the creators side, we can segment even further:

Segments:

i)Heavy posters -Those who post multiple insta stories every day, such as influencers and other insta savvy people.

ii)Medium posters - People who post once a day or less, multiple times per week

iv)Light posters - People who post very rarely. They probably don't like insta stories as a platform.

From these three segments, my vote is to focus on the medium posters, since they have the most room for growth and impact and increasing user engagement over all.

Now, what are some pain points of the medium poster?

Pain Points:

i)They might not find content-worthy perspectives on their daily life - may not think it's worth sharing.

ii)Coming up with captions for a particular post is a hassle.

iii)Coming up with relevant gifs/ stickers/ etc takes work, which discourages them from posting overall.

From these three pain points, the first pain point has the highest effect on the user and their decision to post or not post.

Therefore, the value proposition for this pain point is: As a insta story user, I want to find content worthy moments in my eveyrday life so I can keep my audience engaged with my insta stories

Solutions:

i)An interactive quiz/poll that asks users how their day is going and uses AR to create content clips from the responses of the users automatically. That way, Users can easily get ready-made content for posting on their instagram

ii)AI enabled algorithm that can suggest stickers/gifs promptly with a user's photo, so that a user doesn't need to take time to find the right stcikers and everything

Out of these two solutions, I think 1 will have higher impact as it makes it easier for users to find content worthy clips from their everyday life. It is also a fun quiz activity. Tech implementation wise, 1 is harder than 2, but 1 makes up for it through high user satisfaction.

The metrics we'd measure is i)How many users engaged with the poll ii)# of people posting insta stories iii)frequency of insta stories posted by users.