instagram new user experience

Lead designer for New User Experience and Reachability teams, working closely with engineering, product, data science, and UXR on strategic and executional work.

Please contact me if you’d like a full portfolio presentation.

interest collection

Improving Instagram’s ability to serve relevant content to new users by optimizing interest collection in new user onboarding.

role

Sole product designer

team

Content designer, engineering, PM, DS, UXR, legal

metrics

Feature engagement rate, reels time spent, DAU


existing experience

UXR and DS indicated that the existing interest collection experiences in onboarding were confusing to users, inefficient for downstream relevance usage, and did not work together.

interest picker + tuner

Interest picker

Only available to select Teen users and not hooked up to any relevance models

Reels swipe tuner

Low engagement, often broken, and did not reflect any of the user’s choices from the interest picker


shipped experience

Updated tuning step that used a simpler grid-based approach, directly feeding into a natural-language based drill down experience for more specific interest fine-tuning.

quick permissions

Increasing conversion on system permissions (Push, Location, Contacts) in Instagram’s onboarding while shortening the flow.

role

Sole product designer

team

Content designer, engineering, PM, DS, UXR, legal

metrics

Permission opt-in rates, reciprocal follows, DAU


existing experience

Onboarding had 3 distinct steps to ask users for Push Notification, Location, and Contacts Syncing permissions, leading to user perception that the flow was too long.

Previous learnings

Previous tests had indicated that giving users too much information and dwell time for each permission may have been driving down conversion. Additionally, every distinct onboarding step added to the flow led to incremental churn.


shipped experience

The new experience merged all 3 steps into a single step that then queued up all system dialogs in quick succession.

happy path

Increased speed

Users who enabled all 3 permissions were auto-advanced to the next step of onboarding. We observed increases in conversion on all 3 permission types.

Supporting underlay content

To help user’s recall and understand why each permission was important, underlay content was added below dialogs, when possible.

sad path

Choice confirmation

For users who declined 1+ permissions, we landed them back on the step to confirm their choice and change their mind.

Push reachability fallback

UXR indicated that users were hesitant to turn on notifications due to spam risk. We offered the ability to only enable for messages to users who declined the system dialog, leading to an increase in reachability.