Our teams Product Specialist shared a very interesting finding one day: The new Watch Together feature on Instagram was perfect. Users had reported almost zero issues. Surprising considering a similar feature on Messenger had a healthy stream of minor bug reports. Something didn’t add up.

Hypothesis: There is a problem reporting a problem

I went through the steps a person might take to report a technical issue on Instagram. I didn’t look at our feature specifically. I wanted to get better aquatinted with the core of the Instagram experience, and ask myself how a proficient user might report a technical issue from their home feed.

AFTER 3 CLICKS I HIT A DEAD END —

Conservatively it took me about 16 clicks find where to give feedback to Instagram. Here is what I found:

• The term ‘Report’ is too open to interpretation. Depending on the user’s perspective, ‘Report’ can refer to a person, content, or a technical issue.

• The ‘Something else’ page is inadequate and frustrating. The search is basically useless offering no results for known terms.

• In the screen shot feature: The navigation UI [ < back button] is obscured by a [banner] which turns off the screen shot feature when trying to navigate.

• Starting a bug report from the user’s profile page is unintuitive and the number of steps it takes is not a realistic.

What we did —

Understanding the difficulties of reporting a problem gave us a pretty clear understanding of why we weren’t seeing more feedback from users. This helped us created much simpler option for people trying to report a technical issue. In addition to informing product improvements for Watch Together, we were also able to articulate a number of recommendations for the Instagram team.