Instagram's collaborative video editor designed to foster in-person connection

For Sparkjam, a design jam hosted by SFU Surge, my team created Instagram Moments—a video feature to encourage connection and creativity on Instagram.

After long stretches apart, catching up with friends can feel harder than it should.

While social media offers shortcuts around distance, the memories shared are limited. Ordinary moments aren't recorded, so they are forgotten before friends have the opportunity to share them during hangouts.

Solution

Instagram Moments helps friends to share everyday memories through collaborative video editing.

Through Instagram group chats, friends take short clips of their lives apart. These videos are added to a locked group gallery.

Users review their time apart while selecting video clips. A video celebrating the friend group's daily lives is edited, with music, text, and stickers chosen by the friend group.

The gallery doesn't unlock until the group hangs out in-person. When the app detects all friends in proximity through temporary location access, the gallery unlocks.

*Within our final submission, I focused the most on prototyping, UX writing, and refining interactions. My teammates helped prototyping and made a concept film.

Research

Sharing, gathering, and editing footage are the largest barriers to creating casual group videos.

We surveyed 80+ people on how they share videos with friends. A couple patterns emerged: sharing raw footage felt exposing, gathering footage took too long and was difficult to coordinate, and editing was a difficult task often left to one person.

When asked about an ideal casual video editor, users mentioned platforms they already use daily, and features that would simplify tedious aspects of video creation.

48%

of responders felt most comfortable sharing casual photos on Instagram Close Friends.

58%

of responders felt most comfortable sharing casual photos and videos within group chats.

53%

of responders believed auto-editing would increase their willingness to create and share videos.

To differentiate from competitors who excel in powerful video editing or quick connection when apart, Instagram Moments focuses on convenience, creativity, and meaningful in-person connection.

*Within the research phase, I focused on research synthesis, competitive analysis, and persona creation.

Design Decisions

Fixed-length video clips allow for auto-editing

Clips of the same length and orientation are auto-edited by Instagram Moments, removing the primary barrier to video creation found in our research. This simplifies the creative process to focus on selecting music, videos, text, and stickers.

Design Decisions

A shared gallery that unlocks at hangout encourages in-person connection

Friends add short video clips to a locked shared video gallery. This structures the entire Instagram Moments experience around getting together, rather than simply sharing memories digitally.

Design Decisions

Swipe-style video selection makes reviewing clips with friends simple and fun

To select clips for the final video, friends swipe through their shared gallery on one phone. While discussing videos, friends naturally catch up on each others’ lives and collaborate creatively.

Takeaways

Make time for communication and polish.

Communicate ideas clearly to get good feedback

Discussing with mentors during the design jam, I sometimes struggled to communicate our idea. Communicating our idea and design decisions had a huge impact on the quality of feedback, so moving forward, this is a skill I want to prioritize!

Reserve time to polish

Hearing critiques of the project, I've realized how much every element and micro-interaction either guides or confuses the user. Even on tight deadlines like a design jam, it's important to reserve time to seek user feedback and polish intentionally.