Instagram — UX Design Teardown – A Case Study

1,000,000,000 monthly active users. They must have got it right.

3 min readSep 22, 2020

Most updated version of Instagram [22 Sep 2020] — Introduced Reels

A LinkedIn connection shared the below screenshot and asked me — “Looking at the position/placement of these actionable buttons, can we guess/conclude what exactly Instagram wants its user to do? Can we guess, what is the business approach of Insta through a simple design?”

When Instagram had search in their bottom nav. — When ‘Search’ was part of the bottom nav.

Here’s my answer after thinking about it for an hour.

#5 — Create Post

Most important one. Instagram’s USP (Unique Selling Proposition) to quickly add photos, create post and pinning memories. As per Instagram, this is the primary action, this is what they want their users to do — Generate content.

As you maybe aware, the icons in the bottom nav (bottom navigation bar) are the ones which has maximum prominence. This is because it’s very easily reachable by your right / left thumb. (#6 is the most interesting one, keeping it for the last)

#4 — Activity

Once you add a post, how easily can you know who all liked it? Instagram doesn’t want you to miss these notifications by any means. This is because these are the precious “rewards” which will make sure adding posts becomes a habit for you.

#7 — Home

This is pretty standard across apps (be it App store, e-commerce apps like Flipkart, Myntra). Home is always the left most icon in the bottom nav.

#2 — Message

In my view, messaging is not one of the main things on instagram. Hence it doesn’t deserve a spot in the bottom nav. But why it may be placed in top nav is, it may seem similar to Whatsapp (World’s top 1 messaging platform). They also keep the “compose” icon on the top right, where you can start a new conversation.

#1 — Camera

Here’s why I think Camera is not placed in bottom nav, though I strongly believe that it’s one of the primary actions in Instagram (its USP — Capture & Save Moments).

Imagine ‘Create Post’ & ‘Camera’ was placed next to each other in bottom nav. When you want to add a photo, which one would you click? Seeing both of these options placed close by, would you spend an extra second to think which one to choose?

Maybe to eliminate this confusion / to reduce one thought for the user.
Maybe because their data says users post pictures from their gallery than real time pictures.

#3 — Profile

I don’t have a good answer for this. Really not sure why Profile has a pretty prominent place! My guess here is maybe their data indicates behavior that people often check their own profiles, see if their followers are increasing, revisiting their posts to revisit memories often.

#6 — Search

Last one and the most interesting one. Search was the second icon in bottom nav for many years, till a few days ago. Now it’s replaced with Reels. Why is that? It’s because Instagram can now be the replacement for TikTok. Again, this is something which will bring in stickiness to the product & more users to the platform who are more interested in sharing video clips. Among the ones in bottom nav, maybe Search was the most least used (minor use case) compared to the other ones. Hence Instagram has made a brilliant move in giving Reels a prominent position, making it easily discoverable & accessible.

These are my thoughts. Please feel free to comment if you agree or disagree :)