Instagram is dominant in social media, I think we all know that. What has been surprising is how they’ve developed and innovated (or stole) new app features throughout its lifespan. Truly Instagram has been a pioneer for iterating and giving features to its users to make the platform feel fresh and new often. Because of these brand new features, in some places, Instagram’s UI has become cluttered and unclear, specifically the posting page. This is the design problem I’ve decided to tackle as an exercise to solve different problems through different mediums.

So, let’s look at what the current solution Instagram uses to allow users to post. Immediately, we see a full page of options and it feels busy. Oh, and at the bottom, there’s a separate page for even more settings. Obviously, the design team at Instagram did not create a solution that could even fit every option all in one view. This was the fundamental issue for me. Not allowing users to see everything in context seems like a design failure. Not to mention you can’t even see the post because of how many options and how they’re laid out. My other issue was, the common user will not use or want to use half of these options. Scheduling posts is not typical, adding a fundraiser is few and far between, changing audiences, and sharing posts directly to Facebook are confusing because of their prominence in screen real estate. Not that these features aren’t essential or useful, but they clutter and play down the other post options, and these features are not commonly used or used as often as the others. From this framework, I created a new design for this screen specifically.

My idea was simple, strip down to essential features and create a toolbar for the more superfluous options that would expand on tap and allow for customization. This created a clean, non-obtrusive screen that users can make decisions quicker and more efficiently on.

View the live prototype and get a feel for the whole design.