Today, Instagram is releasing the first big upgrade to its photo filters since the app was launched. But this doesn’t mean new filter’s: Rather, it’s a two-pronged improvement: First, users can tap again after selecting a filter and use a slider to determine just how much of its effect they want to apply. Then, for those who want more control, there are now 8 photo adjustments, which roughly map to the major features you’d find in a photo-editing program: brightness, contrast, warmth, saturation, highlights, shadows, sharpen, and vignette, which darkens a photo’s corners for an antique-y effect.
“The community had wanted new filters for while,” says to Peter Deng, Instagram’s director of product. But the team wanted to keep the new features simple enough not to require much learning. They also wanted to control the app’s sprawl. Hence better tools, not more filters. The update is a welcome addition, but the real craft of it lies in the details. Here’s how Instagram kept the app intuitive despite the increase in functionality:
Slider Behavior
It seems like a small thing, but the sliders are a new UI paradigm for Instagram—and the team sweated its fine nuances. One thing the designers realized very quickly was that it was both tricky and annoying to aim for the slider button itself. If you missed it, you accidentally dragged the slider further than you intended: a common UX failure in many touch apps.
For users to stay engaged, there has to be a continuing sense of surprise.
Instead, Instagram’s coders made the sliders record only relative motion—not your finger’s pinpoint location. So no matter where you touch around the slider button, it’s only going to move in accordance to how much your finger has moved.
Well-Tuned Algorithms
Another common failure with any parameter controlled by a slider is that the extremes are terrible. That does two things: First, it makes the functional range of the slider much smaller. In turn, that makes hard to hit the sweet spot you’re looking for. To work out that problem, Instagram’s engineers tuned the algorithms that determine the slider behavior so that the full range actually results in photos that people might like. There are no dead parts in the spectrum, and spectrum isn’t just a linearly growing application of the effect.
Meanwhile, they also studied atmospheric, analog photographs to mine their exact effects. To perfect the Vignette tool, which shadows the corners of a photo, Instagram’s engineers actually studied how the effect actually works in medium-format cameras, and then carefully mapped those to the effects in the product
Direct Manipulation
People familiar with Instagram will know the pain of cropping a photo then adjusting its tilt, only to realize the new photo isn’t big enough to fill out the frame. With the new Instagram, tilt and crop are placed into one simple interfaces. “We realized that in the user’s mental model, these were the same step,” says Deng. So they created a new UI that does both, through intuitive, direct manipulation of an image.
Where’s Instagram Going Next?
For the coming versions of Instagram, you wonder if the company won’t be accelerating improvements to the whole experience. Instagram may be huge, but the very fact that photo filters are so easy-to-use makes it easy for a competitor to rise quickly, should they figure out a better way to let people express themselves in pictures. For Instagram to keep its users active and obsessed, they’ll need to lead the race to make photos look as good as possible, as fast as possible. That’s the big challenge that this update addresses.
Today, it’s all too easy to find yourself in an Instagram ghetto.
But there is another big improvement that we’ve yet to see: A truly useful evolution in the app’s discovery tools. For now, the service seems irreproachably simple. But many Instagram users have probably noticed how quickly their followers level off—and how quickly their own rates of finding new people to follow level off as well. You could argue that’s a benefit: Instagram is a social experience, but not so social that it swells beyond usability.
But for users to stay engaged, there has to be a continuing sense of surprise. That’s hard to create if people aren’t finding lots of new users or looking at tons of pictures. Today, it’s all too easy to find yourself in an Instagram ghetto with no great new discoveries on the horizon, or to miss the best photos in your own network. There is no simple mechanism to see which photos are being liked the most among your friends, or to filter your own feed based on how long you’ve been away from the service. Miss a day, and you would never know about the epic concert that everyone was at. Like Twitter, it’s an experience that’s far better for power users than for sporadic ones.
Here’s to hoping that Instagram solves those problems in the next rev.
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