How would you improve Instagram?

About the product: Instagram is a social media app by facebook which allows people to express themselves before others by posting photos or videos as posts/stories/ reels. People use instagram to engage with such content posted by others in or outside their network.

Goal: I could think of multiple goals for improvement like acquisition, activation, engagement, revenue and retention. But, for the sake of this question I would like to consider improving engagement for instagram users as my primary goal.

Users: There are primarily 3 broad segments:

1. Creators

2. Consumers

3. Advertisers

Of these 3 I would like to improve the engagement for creators as engaging creators will drive more content, more followers and thereby enagagement on the consumer side as well.

I would like to further narrow down the creator segment as its very broad. Within creators we have segments like

1. Influencers

2. Institutions/organisations/businesses

3. Regular Users

With the rise of creator economy a lot of influencers have started creating content on multiple platforms. These influencers also do command good follower engagement. So I would like to solve for influencers. 

Even for influencers, there exists further cuts based on their interests/profession. One of the sub-segments is "fitness influencers" which is a larger group in this category. As recently people have started taking their healths seriously and want to improve their lives, fitness influencers have good engagement. 

Restate Problem statement: So, in a nutshell 'we want to improve instagram for fitness influencers to improve platform engagement.'

User Problems:

1. wants to share their fitness routine/ workout with their followers

2. Wants to share and advice on dietary tips with their followers

3. Wants to coach clients 

4. Wants to collaborate with other influencers to further promote themselves

I would like to solve pain points 3 and 4 as influencers can possibly improve their follower base and thereby engage more users.

Solutions:

Wants to coach clients:

1. Give an option to influencers to set up their consultation page on instagram through which followers could book slots for live video consultation in the designated slot on instagram.

2. Enable influencers to conduct live workout sessions on instagram.

3. Allow influencers to launch fitness challenges using hashtags.

Wants to collaborate with other influencers to further promote themselves:

1. Allow influencers to collaborate on posts/reels/stories

Prioritized solution: Enable influencers to conduct live workout sessions on instagram as this will directly engage both influencers and followers.

Metrics: 

1. Adoption - % of fitness influencers hosting at least 1 live session in a month

2. Avg. no of live session attendees per day - this will reflect the follower side engagement with live sessions

3. No. of live sessions hosted per month per influencer - this should be viewed in correlation with metric #2 indicating that more and more followerbase are engaging with the sessions and encouraging influencers to conduct more sessions per month

4. Follower base growth week on week for influencers

1. Instagram is an app which helps people quickly edit, share and view photos, reels and videos. Instagram also allows for direct messaging and helps creators and advertisers to gain insights. Paid advertising feature is also available. After facebook acquired instagram, sharing instagram posts on FB is also possible
2. Instagram user categories can be as follows:

            1. Creators

           2. Advertisors

           3. Users who consume, like and share content

3. Our business objective could be to increase revenue, improve engagement or acquire new users. Here I would like to focus on improving engagement.

4. From among the user categories I would like to focus on creators because I think they are at the apex of the driving use of Instagram. If creator bring out newer and better content regularly, it would automatically improve engagement of downstream cosumers,

5. Creators can be of multiple kinds

a. Professional-those who have access to sophesticated video recording and editing tools and who post often

b. Regular/new creator-one who has just started out or is an old user who doesn't post often because he/she doesn't have access to or doesn't understand the complicated video editing tools. Hence, they typically post only photos or short reels and not a lot of video content. Regular users are also confused about the best time to post  which will give best reach.

Here we will focus on regular/new creators as professional creators have already set processes/user flows with regards to video creation and editing

6. Pain points of regular users:

a. I am confused on how to arrange my grid so that it appears attractive. I need some instagram grid preview so that I can decide my posting schedule and plan my creation process.

b. I am unsure how my posting schedule should be. I have observed that views and likes change according to the time of posting, especially for reels. If I could anticipate the response , i will post accordingly

c. I need better video editing tools. Instagram provides very basic tools like adding music or filters. But I have to primarily rely on third party apps for video editing, adding voiceover, original music, adding text to video and so on. Youtube provides better editing capabilities

7. Possible solutions

  1. For use cases a and b, we could have an integrated solution as they are related. Creators can go to the grid preview mode to try out various combinations of their future posts. 

After a particular combination is chosen, users can view posting time which could lead to maximum reach. Users can choose to schedule posting time accordingly.

2. Use case c is more complex. Possible solutions are

Video templates and stock images for in-app creation of attractive videos with minimal effort

Allowing import of external audio file for better voiceovers (Current voiceover option on Instagram is not user friendly. Also original audio file cannot be uploaded)

Text overlay 

8. We shall prioritize the 4 solutions using RICE framework

Grid preview and posting scheduler: 10, 9, 85%, 7

Video templates and stock images: 10, 10, 80%, 9

Import of external audio files: 7, 7, 75%, 5

Text overlay: 6, 6, 70%, 5

RICE score is calculated by R*I*C/E

Using this score, the first solution i.e. the grid preview and posting scheduler solution gets the highest priority followed by the video template solution. This solution would give creators the best reach and also set a posting schedule for them. This will ensure a repeat and assured engagement of creators.

9. To summarize, our business objective was to improve engagement of new/regular creators who do not post regularly. These creators need help in deciding how and when to post their photos/videos/reels. Our Grid previe and posting scheduler will resolve this issue and create better user engagement for Instagram.

Me: Just to clarify my understanding, Instagram is a mobile application where users can post pictures and videos and like and comment on others' posts and also interact with friends over messages. Even businesses can create their brand pages and post content and interact with its followers. Is that correct?

Interviewer: Yes that's correct

Clarifying Questions

Me: Since there are so many aspects we could concentrate on improving I am assuming that user engagement would be the first priority to improve since it fits well with Facebook's mission of bringing the world closer. Is that something you have in mind too?

Interviewer: Yeah improving user engagement sounds good to me

Me: So before going further, I want to divide the users into particular user segments and focus on some user segments, brainstorm the pain points of that particular user segment, and then I can go think about the solutions with respect to those pain points. Unless you want me to add something else, is this course of action sound okay to you?

Interviewer: that sounds good

User Segments

I want to divide users into 3 segments

1. Power Users: Users who actively post on instagram 

2. Normal Users: users who used to post frequently but stopped posting for a while 

 3. Occasional users: Users who never posted

I want too concentrate on the pain points of normal users since I think there would be a huge chunk of users who would fall under this category. If we incentivize these users I think the over all engagement would increase.

Pain points of "normal users" segment will be:

1. users are having trouble creating content.

1.  they might think that they dont have anything interesting to post creative content or they dont find the right pictures to post
2. users faced negative criticism to their pictures/videos in the past 
3. users are worried about not getting enough likes or comments
4. users might think that their posts are too controversial/pretentious and their friends would judge them 

2. some users want to show their content only to a specific group of followers and dont want to show to everyone because of privacy concerns. This makes them post less on their feed

I want to prioritize my pain points as 2, 1.3,1.4, 1.1 , 1.2

Solutions 

2. while creating the post, we can provide an option where the user can create a friend group where the user can select  specific followers who can view that particular post. The effort taken to build this would be less because this kind of feature already exists for stories. I am confident that the impact would be medium 

1.3 we could provide a feature where the user could disable the likes and comments while posting and make sure that the user is aware of this feature by sending push notification which says something like "now you can disable likes and comments to your posts"

1.4 we could highlight the posts from the users' followers which received mixed reaction and show them at the beginning of their feed or send push notifications to ask the user for their opinion to make them feel that it is normal for users to be opinionated and encourage them to post. The effort will be low because the ranking algorithm already exists and only certain tweaks should be made such that we highlight certain posts. The impact will be low

1.1 whenever the user is at a certain location and gets tagged in pictures, and the user also clicks pictures in that location, we could create an algorithm which would select certain pics from the users album, apply certain filters to the pictures and push that notification to the user recommending the user to post it with a click of a button. The effort taken to build this would be high because we want our algorithm to select the right pictures and apply aesthetic filters to make the user highly probable to post it. The impact would be medium and the tradeoff here would be that the user should be willing to share his/her location all the time

1.2 i think instagram is doing a good job by providing an option to report negative criticism right now

I would prioritize 2, 1.3 solutions to build, based on their low effort and medium  impact. 

Metrics to Measure Success:

1. out of the unique users who create post, how many users are using the create custom group feature to increase their privacy

2. out of the users who were sent the push notification "now you can disable likes and comments to your post" how many of them clicked that notification and created a post by disabling likes and comments

Conclusion:

I would increase the engagement by making users to post more content by building features which would enable the user to select only a certain group of friends who can view the post and make the users aware of the disablling comments and likes feature by sending push notifications 

Here's the structure I'd use for this type of Facebook product improvement interview question.

What is Instagram

Instagram is a mobile application that helps people quickly edit and share photos / videos publicly or to a pre-approved audience. They can also share images, videos, and other people's posts privately via direct messages. People can also share disappearing stories via Stories feature, watch long-form videos on IGTV.

User Categories

Instagram has three broad categories of users:

1. Creators who share photos
2. Consumers who like and comment on posts, or share them privately
3. Advertisers that want to reach relevant audiences

Business Objective

Is the goal of our improvement exercise to acquire new users, drive more engagement among existing users, increasing revenue, or something else (like saying limiting Instagram use)? Let's say that our objective is to drive more engagement among existing users.

Specific User Segment

Let's assume we are focused on improving the experience for Creators because more photos by creators would allow consumers to consume more, which will drive other metrics of engagement. Creators come in various shapes and forms. They can be segmented by kind (celebrities, regular creators, brands and organizations), by frequency of use (high frequency posters and low frequency posters), by nature of users (new users, old users, etc.), by posting history (used to be frequent but not anymore, never posted, posts but has a lot of gaps between posts), etc.

Let's pick a regular user who is low frequency poster, an old user, has created some posts in the past but doesn't post too frequently. For this user, our goal is to increase the number of posts they create.

User Problems

To drive that, we need to understand why people post on Instagram and why they don't.

Why people post → why they don't:

• Show off creativity → I don't feel I'm creative enough or click good enough pictures.
• Share about life with their friends → My life isn't interesting enough.
• To get likes and comments → I won't or don't get enough likes and comments.
• It's a part of my daily life → I forget to post on Instagram even when I click a good picture.

User Journey

Clicking a good picture → Applying filters and editing the pic right → Adding captions and hashtags → Post → Get likes and comments

Possible Touchpoints and Solutions

• Clicking good picture: When a user clicks a good picture, Instagram in the background can run some screening to pick really good pics and tell users to share them (possibly with an indication of number of likes or comments they'll get for such a picture).
• Editing the picture: If users are confounded by which filter to apply, how to adjust - give an auto suggested set of edits (using AI) that the user can apply in one tap.
• Adding captions and hashtags: Auto append relevant hashtags to a post based on whatever the post contains (#dogstagram for pics of dogs, etc.) and potentially give caption suggestions (Quotes, perhaps).

One of the biggest drivers of posting on Instagram for creators is to get more likes. If that can happen, they will naturally be more incentivized to share on Instagram more frequently. So, we can add a couple of levers to make this more probable as well.

• Setup a Rising Star leaderboard that shows best pics from new posters (in our cohort) so that they can get more likes from Encouraging Users.
• Push out a notification to people who have liked or commented on this person's post or interacted with them a lot in the past so that they can like the post.

Prioritizing Solutions via RICE

• InstaWorthy Pic Selector: 9 | 10 | 90% | 7
• Filter Suggest: 7 | 8 | 75% | 3
• Autocaptions and Hashtags: 8 | 6 | 70% | 4
• Rising Star leaderboard: 7 | 8 | 80% | 4
• Notification to drive engagement: I think it already exists

Metrics to focus on

• Number of new posts per user per week in this cohort (North Star)
• Clickthrough rates on InstaWorthy notification
• Number of posts created with AutoSuggest Filters
• Number of posts created with AutoSuggest Captions and Hashtags
• Number of views per post on Rising Star leaderboards (compared to posts by same cohort not on the leaderboard)
• Number of likes per post on Rising Star leaderboards (compared to posts by same cohort not on the leaderboard)

Product Understanding

Instagram is a social media platform that allows users to share photos, videos, stories, and live videos with their friends/followers. It also enables users to talk to/ message people. There are various filters available that users can use to make their stories and post look better/ more interesting. It also helps brands run advertisements.

Problem Statement

Improve Instagram is a vague statement, there could be various things around which improvement could be required to increase revenue for the company, increase user engagement, increase retention. Here we'll try to solve for increased engagement

Metrics

Users engage with Instagram with the following ways

1. Linking posts 

2 commenting on posts

3. Creating posts

4. Creating stories

5. Watching stories

6. Messaging people

We can capture an increase in these activities per day to see if the steps we take to engage users are working

User Profiles

1. Frequent Users - users who create posts/stories daily. Use the messaging service and like/comment on other people's post daily

2. Casual users - users who use Instagram daily but post only occasionally. They like other peoples post though

3. Lite users - Users who don't use Instagram regularly

We'll look at the issues that Frequent users face and try to solve them as further increasing their activity would lead to overall engagement on the app

User pain points

1. Users post regularly, they have to come up with witty/likeable captions for all their posts, which takes a lot of searching outside the app

2. They have hundreds of post and if they want to check some older post it takes a lot of time

3. They have to check other peoples post for inspiration and again it talks a lot of time to find a particular post they want to check

4. It's difficult to look at followers activity if one person went on a post liking spree, the users have to scroll a lot to see other people's activities. Browsing other people's activities helps people discover new content and like different things.

I would like to address the 1st pain point as it is directly affecting people's ability to post more, who are already willing to post more.

Possible Solutions

1. Create a catalogue of quotes from famous people, books, authors, poems and make them searchable by tags like beach, tree, vacation, moods. Make it available on the screen where users are prompted to add a caption to the image so users can find their favourite quotes within Instagram and don't have to look anywhere else

2. Give users the option to like captions for posts and allow people adding posts to look at the most liked / trending captions to draw inspirations

3. Get people to add location and tags to their posts and based on the tags, location, and the image use ML to suggest captions
 

Evaluate Solutions
Out of these possible solutions, solution 1 would give users the most diverse options for captions which they could also relate to the most and hence drive maximum engagement. 

Let me start by asking a few questions.

Me: What are the users unhappy about ? Is it ability to add photos ? Apply filters ? Follow/Unfollow ? Add layouts on photos? Live Tvs ? Search functionality ? Finding relevant content ? notifications ? Too many spam profiles ? 

Interviewer : Spam profiles. 

Me - Does that mean users are followed by spam profiles or are they receiving spam messages or spam comments on photos?

Interviewer : Followed by Spam Profiles 

Goals - Instagram is a community of people, sharing memories in the form of photos and videos. Instagram is also a market place with seller side and buyer side.

Metrics - 1. Reduction of spam profiles on the platform 2. Overall NPS score by users

Users - Users can be segmented on the basis of usage - Frequent users who share and view content and spend X amount of time on the platform. These users engage more in terms of buying products and seeking experiences by following influencers. Casual users who post once in a while but mostly just view content. InActive users who dont share much about themselves but are on the platform on and off. 

Issues with the product - 1. Spam Followers (Spam - Inactive profiles following active users) 2. Scraping data and reselling to 3rd party 

We will focus on 1st problem here.

Solution - 

1. Define policies to identify spam profile. Use ML/AI to categorize them and delete them from the platform. 

2. Use data science to only allow upto 10 degree connections to be followed. For example - User 1 can only follow user 2 if they are within 10 degree of connections. (Exclude businesses from this)

3. Limit the number of 'follows' in a day (Assuming automated bots are used to mass follow active users)

Tradeoffs - All the solutions above can impact seo and growth. There's a possibility of legit profiles being categorized as spam. Identify a way for these legit profiles caught by the software to be put back in the pool.

Prioritize -