BrokenSnowGlobe will periodically feature product bugs that come up within the scope of using in our day-to-day lives
Description: Exiting User Stories does not match exiting in the rest of the Instagram application
Severity: 3 (medium) (1 to 5 scale)
Priority: 2 (medium-high) (1 to 5 scale)
I recently started using Instagram more. I always loved it conceptually, but it took me a long time to adopt it. I like the idea of picking your best photo and how the filters give you the power to make something moderately artistic that still showcases your photo. Still for me it was always a struggle to leave Facebook behind. Posting to more than one social media site was not something I really have time for. Even now while I do find myself posting more photos there, I don’t find myself looking at other people’s as often so it can feel a bit one sided. For a while, I used to use apps that posted to several sites all at once, but ultimately got frustrated because they all have their different requirements and I didn’t like always having to deal with the lowest common denominator.
What has finally motivated me more recently has been avoiding politics. I’ve come to appreciate Instagram more, because I can get away from hearing about Donald Trump. My Facebook feed has largely become a way for people to voice their frustrations with Trump and while I have similar concerns I also often need a break from all that. And don’t get me wrong, because I think politics is important, but I miss seeing more about the lives of my friends and family. I miss their reactions and pictures of art shows, bars, vacation pics, family pics, food pics, drinking to excess, selfies and more selfies, and really most of all their cats.
That said, with my newfound adoption I continue to struggle with exiting out of User Stories every time I use Instagram. Visually to me the feature looks tacked on, but even beyond that they seem to be ignoring the user behavior that they have defined everywhere else in the application. Nearly every place in the application when you want to exit something uses a left arrow at the top of the screen.
If you want to exit from a picture you are viewing you click at the arrow at the top left.
If you want to exit from a video you are viewing again you click at the arrow at the top left.
If you go to add a post, the cancel button is on the top left.
The user behavior that the application has trained users for is when they want to exit something you use the left arrow. But suddenly when you enter a User Story video, the exit button is on the right.
Similarly, with” Videos You Might Like”, the user control to exit is again on the right.
This adds to feeling that the User Story feature has just been tacked on as opposed to truly integrating it within the experience. Ultimately, it has definitely lead to frustration for myself as a user and seems likely to do the same for the general user. The experience feels disjointed as the application screens don’t feel like they properly fit together.
Perhaps even more humorously is that there a type of testing called “User Story Testing” that is meant to prevent these types of issues. Someone at Instagram might want to get on that.
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