I spend a lot of time on
I can usually keep up with my personal feed, but there are moments when time stacks up and I am left with some heavy scrolling ahead if I want to cover all the posts I missed. I don't mind anticipating this build, in fact I anticipate it. Many of the feeds I follow are inspiring and educational. But there is one control I feel Instagram leaves the user in the dark on, it is
...the dreaded instagram refresh.
A user returns to their feed from an interuption and finds that the content has refreshed to display the linear timeline that relates to the users followed accounts and any posts the followed may have made. The user now has a gap that they want to explore, and more importantly, that they have to locate. Visually, it might look something like below.
The user wishes to eliminate the gaps, but in order to do so they have to scroll through previously viewed posts. In my personal experience this has caused me to drop in annoyance. This is a missed opportunity in all corners of the relationships between users, and the relationships between Instagram and their advertisers.
Three examples that could eliminate the gap
One. Pause Button.
One of the greatest attributes with streaming content is being able to pause and return at your leisure. Users are not filled with a negative anxiety of involvement but of positive anticipation, which they can control. When Pausing within the Xfinity by Comcast platform, users are shown how much time has elapsed between the interaction and real time. This reference allows uses to continuously gauge and control their anticipation. Do they have enough time to finish what they started? Will they need to return later? Whatever they decide, they control, which is a fundamental user experience.
Two. Time Travel* *Instagram only
Instagram could add another level of functionality that allows uses to control how they interact with their content via a scrubbing timeline. Think of the linear carousel that Apple uses for viewing files, or how YouTube uses still frames to allow users to scrub through content. Instagram already uses thumbnail previews when touching and holding on an image. The same functionality could be modified to create the scrub.
Three. Settings. Functional, but boring.
The third and probably less intuitive and exciting could be a new setting. Users could select how often they want their feed to update, much like how we can tell our phones when to dim out and lock itself. A variety of options could exist, from every time the app is opened, hourly, manually.
Giving users more control of their content is always a great advancement. I would love to see Instagram take advantage of what I believe is a wedge between consuming and controlling.
Thanks For Looking!
