Instagram Insights: Deepening Rewards to Drive More Meaningful Daily Usage

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Instagram Insights September 15, 2020 at 9:44 AM # Deepening Rewards to Drive More Meaningful Daily Usage Check out how we can promote healthy daily usage by deepening the rewards we deliver! We conducted 1 hour in-depth interviews with 12 people (4 teens, 4 young adults, 4 adults) with low to high Instagram engagement to uncover what reward means to them in the context of Instagram and competitors apps (Snapchat, TikTok and Youtube). We synthesized this data with academic literature to understand how it applies at a psychological level. *P.S. Turned off comments to centralize to note itself. Also keep on the lookout for invitation for the shareout of these findings!* ## **TLDR:** * As expressed by participants and supported by the psychological motivation cycle - **Reward is the satisfaction one feels when they achieve the desired outcome from actions they have taken to fulfill a need.** This means, when an app does the job it was hired to do consistently, quickly and effectively, usage of the app itself is perceived as a rewarding experience overall by users.** * Participants described three intrinsically motivated experiences that produced deep feelings of reward when using Instagram and/or any one of the competitor apps. These also aligned with basic psychological needs theory: **Building relationships** (existing or new); *supports need for "relatedness"* * **Discovering desirable content;** *supports the need for "competence"* * **When either of the above led to a real-world outcome** such as hanging out, making money, starting a project, etc.; *supports the need for "autonomy"* * **The ratio of time spent to reward reached was perceived as unsatisfactory** on Instagram. Participants did not feel rewarded as often or as deeply on Instagram in comparison to competitor apps. * **The path to satisfying their intent had a major impact on the participants' perception of how rewarding using the app was.** In comparison to competitors, the combination of content and interactions on Instagram presented distractions that could easily derail the user from fulfilling their intent faster. * **When reward was reached less often or slower than expected, people described opening the app habitually and using it passively instead of intently.** This was the case for many of our participants regarding Instagram. **Recommendations** 1. Reward users by contributing more to their intrinsic motivations for using Instagram. 1. ***Building relationships*:** Building relationships requires a reciprocal interest between people. Today that reciprocity is mainly expressed through lightweight interactions that some users perceived as superficial and didn't help them further their connection. Focusing on **conversation starters or profile features** that help connections easily identify things they have in common can increase the opportunity for users to deepen their connection and satisfy their intrinsic need for relatedness. 1. ***Discovering desirable content*:** **Identifying differentiated account use cases** (finsta, interest acct, business acct, etc.) and using those distinctions to help users build a graph could more directly deliver the intrinsic rewards associated with their intent. 1. ***Discovering desirable content*:** Encourage users to leverage **search** to reliably find the people and content that they want. Elevating the search experience will take some of the responsibility off of passive discovery surfaces (Like Feed, Reels and Explore) to predict what users want at a session level by **giving them the ability to fulfill their intent directly on their own.** 1. ***Real-world outcomes*:** **Develop our product experiences to provide a clear path to activity that has implications for the user off of the app**. A deeper understanding of intent will help us identify those user goals and learn more about how we can become the obvious utility to reach them. 1. **Increase the perception of reward reliability by leveraging want-rate for notifications** at the user level to reduce friction and distractions and ensure a rewarding outcome for each notification they receive. 1. **Invest in interventions that help people (especially young people) control their usage.** The IG Well-Being team has proposed several solutions that have been well received in research. We should continue to explore, iterate and test these tools and track satisfaction with usage over time upon implementing them. This will further support their need for autonomy. September 15, 2020 at 11:00 AM cc Adam Mosseri Vishal Shah Luke Woods Kristin Hendrix RE: Unpacking "rewards" follow up from Teen Fundamentals review September 15, 2020 at 11:03 AM cc Max Eulenstein Brett Westervelt OutOfOffice Bot on September 15, 2020 at 11:03 AM I'm sorry but is currently out of the office. Her message is: Hi, I'm OOO from 9/8 - 9/18 (childcare admin leave). Please reach out to the following POCs if this is urgent: * IG Acquisition: * IG Activation * IG Notifications: * Anything else: Thanks! Saana on September 15, 2020 at 11:36 AM this is really sobering to read. We've been thinking a lot about the building relationships problem and we truly haven't been able to shift behavior in terms of conversation starters... Love that people are using secondary accounts to basically hack the experience to be more focused and tailored to a particular use case and the relationships that go along with it. I wonder if we could do even more to deepen engagement with your graph for secondary accounts... cc Laycee John Ebo on September 15, 2020 at 12:35 PM cc really interesting insights on rewarding experiences that can be applied to the work on conversations and conversation starters! Kristin Hendrix on September 15, 2020 at 12:44 PM Jenni for FYI on September 15, 2020 at 1:08 PM cc Betty, Roberto, Tomas on September 15, 2020 at 1:24 PM cc Max Eulenstein Brett Westervelt on September 15, 2020 at 1:35 PM This is so awesome!!! September 15, 2020 at 2:21 PM Yes, I definitely believe that additional accounts are a way that users are able to streamline their connections and content thereby mentally organizing their intent. Learning more about the distinctions of these use cases could give us insight on how to rank and recommend content. On the relationship building side, this is a tricky one. I've done some research about the effect of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivations CONFIDENTIAL - PROTECTED BY CONFIDENTIALITY AGREEMENT MT-IG-AG-00145596 and it does point to obtaining short-term rewards (in our case, lightweight interactions like reactions, emojis, and likes) as potentially replacing intrinsic motivations which creates a perpetual ecosystem of superficial connections. It could be quite a lift to shift users' mental models of how to use IG, but as you noted there could be potential to reintroduce IG (or maybe Threads?) to drive relationship building when we know that is their intent for their secondary acct.' CONFIDENTIAL - PROTECTED BY CONFIDENTIALITY AGREEMENT MT-IG-AG-00145597