Instagram Collaborations
Adding a new feature where users can save and share photo and video inspiration with their friends and family.
Year:
2022
Timeframe:
12 weeks
Tools:
Figma, Maze
Category:
New Feature
01 • Overview
Context
Instagram is a natural place to discover and save inspiration, but saved content is often a personal, siloed experience. I explored how the existing Saved experience could evolve into a more collaborative tool for planning and organizing ideas with friends—without requiring users to leave Instagram or adopt a separate planning app.
The Challenge
The challenge was to introduce collaboration within the constraints of an existing product and its established patterns. I designed a concept for Instagram Collaborations that allows users to invite friends to personalized saved folders and control each collaborator’s permissions. The experience creates a foundation for shared planning while leaving room for future capabilities such as filtering, sorting, and commenting.
02 • Approach
Research + Insights
Through a survey and three 30-minute interviews, I found two consistent frustrations with Instagram’s saving experience: users struggled to share and organize saved content.
I then created a persona, Tracy Trends, to represent this need—a 29-year-old nurse who uses Instagram to discover and save travel inspiration with friends.
Lastly, competitive research across Yelp, Spotify, Google Docs, Pinterest, and Google Maps revealed common patterns for collaboration, including inviting contributors, sharing links, and managing access.
These insights informed my HMW—“How might we help Tracy Trends do, see, and try more things with her saved content?”—and helped me prioritize sharing to saved folders as the core MVP feature.
Ideation + Iteration
I mapped the sharing experience through a user flow to anticipate edge cases and define the core tasks:
adding and removing collaborators
managing permissions
sharing via link
I then explored layouts through sketching, ultimately using overlays to keep users anchored to the Collection page rather than introducing unnecessary navigation.
Throughout iteration, I prioritized familiarity over reinvention, making the smallest changes necessary to introduce collaboration without disrupting the existing Instagram experience.
03 • Validation
Testing + Feedback
Weekly group critiques helped me identify opportunities to make actions more intuitive and digestible—for example, replacing an ambiguous plus icon with a clearer invitation action.
I also tested the feature with six participants through a live Maze study, evaluating three core tasks: adding a friend, changing their permissions, and removing them from a collection.
All participants successfully completed each task, with speed and accuracy improving across the flows. The main friction point was finding the settings button to manage permissions, which revealed an opportunity to make the action more contextual.
Based on this feedback, I moved contributor permissions directly onto the Collection page, reducing the flow from five clicks to three and improving learnability.
04 • Reflection
Key Outcomes
What I ultimately delivered was a net-new collaborations feature that transforms saved collections from a personal archive into a shared space for inspiration and planning. Users can invite friends to collections, manage contributor permissions, remove collaborators, and share collections via a link—all within Instagram’s existing saving experience. By keeping the experience familiar and focused, the feature introduces collaboration without disrupting the core workflow, while creating a foundation for future capabilities like filtering, sorting, and commenting.
3
NEW
task flows
11
NEW
design system components
✨
NEW FEATURE
ready for development
Reflections
This project reinforced the importance of designing for the full ecosystem, not just the primary user. My next step would be to explore the recipient experience, including how invited collections are distinguished from personal ones, how access requests work, and how users manage notifications. After launch, I’d use engagement metrics and qualitative feedback to understand whether collaboration is resonating with Instagram users and where friction remains. If adoption is strong, I’d explore the additional opportunities uncovered through research—such as notes, advanced filtering and sorting, and chat—to evolve Saved into a more collaborative space for discovering, organizing, and planning ideas.
