How Instagram Hooks You Up
Being a huge fan of behavioral psychology, I like to analyze popular apps to see what techniques they use to attract and engage users. Today you will learn how Instagram onboards new customers, creates habit loops, drives your behavior, and hooks you up. Get on board! 👇
Sign up
So, it all starts with the sign-up process. The very first screen is extremely simple — logo, sign up&log in options. Quite minimalistic, and it helps users to make a quick decision as you have only two options left. According to the Hick’s law:
The more choices users have, the harder it’s for them to make one.
For every product, registration is one of the most important steps users have to complete. Once created an account, user can interact with other features, including monetizing, shopping etc. How to get users to sign up?
If you want people to do something, make it as easy as possible.
That’s the core of the behavioral theory by BJ Fogg. You need three things to nudge a person to do something — Motivation, Ability, and Trigger. Together they create an easy formula of human behavior. To do something, people need the desire, ability to do this, and a trigger that will nudge them to act. It’s hard to influence people’s motivation, but you can increase the ability level, making the process as easy as possible. For example, when providing the email I have a predefined set of the most popular email services, so I don’t have to manually type ‘gmail.com’ or ‘yahoo.com’.
The sign-up process consists of six steps. One task per step is a smart solution because users perceive a complicated task easier to complete if it’s split into smaller ones. If you can’t get rid of certain steps, you can try to make them perceive easy and simple. The nice touch is how Instagram explains why they need your name (so your friends could find you) or propose to save your password.
Onboarding
For Instagram, an active user is the one who has registered, followed other accounts, posts content and interacts with other users posts. That’s what Instagram wants you to do right after sign up. They ask you to find your Facebook friends (chances are bigger that you will follow people you know), request access to your contact book (another way of nudging users to follow people they know) and add a profile photo.
Right after you uploaded the photo, Instagram proposes to share it to your feed in one tap. That’s a clever way to nudge users to make the first step — create a post. There is a possibility that your followers will like your photo or leave a comment that would also lead you to a desired for Instagram behavior — answering comments, liking followers photos etc.
And the last step of the onboarding is the list of popular accounts to follow. These are mainly celebrities with millions of followers, so chances are that you’d like to follow some of them. Also, the following process is easy — you see the bright button with straightforward copy that works like the trigger in the MAT formula. One tap — and it’s done.
First Touch
The UI of Instagram is quite simple and based around the content. Fewer chances you’ll get distracted when interacting with the app. Several years ago, when Instagram has launched the redesign, they met a huge wave of hate. People didn’t like the interface simplifying and monochrome colors. But Instagram designers were right about the changes and the importance of content, not UI.
The first thing you see in the Instagram feed is your recent post (if you added and shared your profile photo). People tend to love what belongs to them, so their faces, names, content will always attract their attention. Also, the post works like an investment in the app. That means it’s harder to delete your account once you have put some efforts into it.
Right here, you can see the ‘Suggested for you’ section. It also nudges you to interact with Instagram and follow other accounts. If your feed is empty, you’ll not use the app. The more people you follow, the more likely you’ll like someone’s selfie or your follower will leave a comment under your Sunday walk photo.
To increase chances for users to interact with content, Instagram fills the Discovery screen with personalized images. Depending on who you follow or what you liked, Instagram provides the content you may like. Quite smart solution and works great both for Instagram (personalized content increases chances for users to interact with) and users (they want to see what they’re interested in).
And when you think you’re safe, you find another ‘Discover people’ section in your profile screen. ‘Spice must follow,’ I say. But you can see here another interesting section — ‘Complete your profile’. People are lazy and rarely complete their profiles until they feel a true urge to do it. Instagram uses a tactic called ‘Zeigarnik effect’. It’s based on a psychological effect that people remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks. And here you literally see ‘2 of 4 complete’ label. Seeing completed tasks with their green checkboxes works like a trigger that nudges you to make other tasks as checked, too.
Posting Photos
Content is the fuel of Instagram. How you make users to post more photos? Right, making this process as easy as possible. Tapping the ‘+’ icon (placed at the bottom of the screen, so it’s easy to reach with your thumb), Instagram automatically selects your latest image for posting. They are not asking you to select a photo from a gallery or something like this. Chances are that you’d like to post the photo you’ve just taken, so it makes sense to use it by default. Actually, using defaults is an effective method when there is inertia or uncertainty in decision making, and you want to nudge people to a certain action.
The power of Instagram is in making regular photos look nice. Not everyone knows how to properly edit photos, and here come the filters. They are a set of predefined settings that allow anybody to give their photos a great look in one tap. It’s much easier to use ready-made choices than edit photos every time. However, users can enhance their photos manually, but the filters option is selected (ahem) by default.
It takes only three steps to post a photo. The last one allows to share your photo on Facebook or other social media. More ways of sharing photos means more people’d see and like them. Tagging people is a cute way to increase users’ interaction. It’s related to a social technique called ‘Reciprocation’. When someone gives you something, you feel oblige to return the favor. When someone tagged you, it obliges you to respond and tag this person as well. Same thing works for likes and follows.
Creating Habits
Like every serious business, Instagram wants more customers regularly using their product. They make sign-up, follow, post photo processes as easy as possible. To stick users to the app, they have to convert users’ actions into a habit.
Actually, influencing someone’s behavior is hard, including our own. We start jogging but quit in three days. We want to use Facebook less often, but the next second we scroll the feed. Motivation is not enough to change behavior, that’s why we quit new activities. Habits are what we tend to do even without strong incentives.
Building a habit is a simple process:
receive a trigger → perform an action → get a reward → invest more.
You receive a notification from Instagram that someone liked your photo (external trigger) or you feel this itching desire to check if someone liked your photos (internal trigger). This trigger makes you get the phone and open Instagram (action). Right after that, you get the reward — see new likes, comments, messages, tags. You check recent images, scroll the feed, replay to comments, investing more of your time and attention. You make this investment hoping to get more rewards in the future. And the loop repeats.
What’s more important, the reward you get is variable, it changes every time you open the app. It stimulates you to open the app more and more, as you don’t know what you will get next.
Another technique used by almost every social network is infinite scroll. Like on Facebook, you scroll Instagram feed, and you don’t know what’d you see next. It nudges you to keep scrolling to get your variable reward. The same principle is used in slot machines, and these things know well how to hook people.
When you look at the photo in the feed, you see the number of likes alongside with the names of your friends who liked it. These works like social proof — people copy the actions of others in an attempt to undertake behavior in a given situation. If more people watch a new TV show, the more likely your brain will consider it worth watching, too. That’s why ratings and reviews are so powerful. Also, when people you know like something, this adds another trust layer. 100 people liked a photo? I notice it. Martha Kellogg, my colleague I work with every day, liked a photo? Now you’ve got my full attention.
Once you followed someone’s account, Instagram immediately shows you related accounts to follow. Another method called ‘Foot-in-the-door technique’. People tend to agree to a large request by having them agree to a modest request first. If you already said yes, more likely you’d say yes once again.
Breaking Habits
Okay, Instagram isn’t that evil. Alongside with using different techniques to hook users, they also provide solutions how not stuck in the app forever.
First, they break the infinite scroll with the ‘You’re All Caught Up’ message. That’s an important feature, and it’s a pity how few of the social networks use the same approach. Second, Instagram allows you to track time you spent in the app, set up reminders and limit your activity.
Showing number of likes is a powerful method to nudge people to interact with a particular photo. On the other side, it also creates an addiction in checking how many people liked my photo. We are happy getting more likes and feel frustrated when not. This forces us to find new ways in taking cool photos, creatively editing them in order to get a post that would collect a lot of likes. And this activity also helps to grow anxiety, stress and even depression. We watch how many likes gets your photo comparing with your friends’, and if we got less, we feel frustration. And I’m not even talking about jealousy watching perfect images of others’ perfect lives (even if it’s not true in reality).
To help users to reduce this issue, Instagram allows you to hide the number of likes. That’s quite revolutionary feature as number of likes literally is one of the cornerstones of Instagram. I wonder how would it change user’s behavior in the future.
Overview
Instagram is one of the most popular social networks in the world. They use many techniques based on human psychology and social sciences to onboard more users and hook them up. It’s easy to build a habit of using Instagram every day. Running for likes and comparing our life with other people’s lives caused anxiety and depression. Instagram tests new features to reduce this issue, yet it’s the core of any social network.
