February-April 2023
Challenge: While the social web offers valuable resources and community, it can also foster toxic behaviors, often concealed behind anonymous profiles or usernames. How can we design solutions within social media platforms like Instagram to mitigate these harmful behaviors and promote a healthier online environment?
Role – UX Designer & Researcher
Team – Michelle Jia, Da Sol Kim, Philip Lee, Brandon Wei, Jennifer Zhang, Emilie Zhou
Project Overview
There can be a lot of toxic and negative experiences on social media platforms, such as Instagram. This includes trolling, spam comments, or simply irrelevant content that promotes negativity. Users may encounter comments they don’t want to see on posts, which could then discourage them from commenting or even opening up the comments section.
Another feature of Instagram is blurring out sensitive posts. However, there is rarely any context on what kind of photo is being blurred out. Users may be offended by some types of sensitive content but okay with others, making it difficult for them to distinguish if they want to view that content. Transparency is something that is important when engaging with online content.
Therefore, for this course, Social Web, our team decided to tackle the problem of mitigating toxic behaviors and promoting positive community engagement on Instagram.
Research and Ideation
For this project, we started off with doing some background research and literature reviews on what current research there is on this topic. We identified the current features of Instagram, such as the existing content blurring, favoriting accounts to view only posts from them or who you follow, and comment filtering.
We already began our ideation process, taking inspiration from the existing features on Instagram, in order to better seamlessly introduce methods to mitigate toxic behaviors.
As part of our research phase, we also conducted a survey to learn about user experiences on Instagram, as well as learn about their needs and pain points. In this initial survey, we asked 27 participants questions on the impact of social media on their well-being, their experiences dealing with toxicity on Instagram, and their thoughts on the impact of our proposed new features. When asking the participants whether they noticed if social media had influenced their well-being, 55.6% answered “Yes”, and 18.5% answered “Maybe”. More results from this initial survey showed that many toxic interactions that people encounter included toxic comments and messages on Instagram, as well as seeing second-hand toxicity from other people’s content. Participants also generally seemed to like our idea of adding content tags to sensitive posts and our idea of filtering comments the most.
Through the initial survey, we were able to learn more about user experiences on Instagram and how to design features that would address users’ struggles with the platform. Our goal was to give users greater control over what they see to improve their experiences on Instagram and their feelings toward the greater community.
Final Deliverable
Our final design consists of three main features. Users can:
- Add tags to sensitive posts, so that others have the context to make informed decisions.
- Achieve higher badge ranks by helping their community through content tagging.
- Choose which comments they want to see to avoid any toxic and trolling behaviors, including hiding all comments.
With this solution, we wanted users to have more control over what content they see while improving user experiences and feelings toward the online community. Badges incentivize people to help moderate posts through content tagging, and using gamification helps to encourage users to follow along and contribute. In our design, comments and posts with higher ranking badges are meant to be displayed more, which would ideally promote more positive postings. Having a “friends watch out for friends” mentality with content tagging, we hope to improve transparency and create a safer-feeling environment.
Reflection
Conducting an extensive literature review was an essential part of our research process, as it helped us gain a comprehensive understanding of the current situation of toxic behaviors on social media. By diving into existing studies, reports, and articles, we were able to identify common patterns, challenges, and gaps in the ways platforms are addressing this issue. This foundation of knowledge not only informed our approach but also allowed us to better understand the scope and complexity of the problem.
Overall, this project helped me learn how begin formulating a research plan from a very general project topic. Working with others from different skillsets and backgrounds also helped me to see how these different disciplines can interlock and help each other.
Michelle Jia 