[Ian] A big part of how humanity experiences the universe is visual.
You carry around this device with you that allows you to capture
what you're seeing in a moment in time,
and then send it anywhere and everywhere on Earth.
You have this magic piece of glass
that creates these very transformational experiences
that can teleport you to a place and time.
It's a way of bringing things that are far away closer.
It's pretty powerful how that's evolved
in a fairly short amount of time in human history.
[woman] I don't think anyone could've anticipated
how successful Instagram would’ve been.
It's hands down one of the most influential technologies.
[female newscaster] Instagram announcing that it now has over 400 million...
[male newscaster] One billion monthly active users.
[man] Ian Spalter is a big name here in Silicon Valley.
One in seven people on the planet are using a product that Ian oversees.
That's astonishing.
[man 2] I can't imagine Instagram without Ian.
His infatuation with craft
let me know that he was going to be the person to lead design.
[woman] The nature of Silicon Valley is iterating,
is seeing what's next, is looking at what's new.
[camera shutters clicking]
[alarm clock beeping]
[thump]
[Ian] Design is everywhere.
There's nothing that you use that isn't designed in some way.
Their designed to help you complete a given task.
It's just a matter of how well designed it is or not.
A design isn't just what it looks like in a given moment.
It has to do with the entire experience of using a particular product or service.
[man] The easiest way to talk about user experience
is in combination with UI.
UI stands for user interface.
Those are just the visual and physical elements
that a person interacts with when using a device.
UX stands for user experience.
And that is literally the experience a person has while using a user interface.
Those feelings can be emotions like happiness
or frustration and everything in between.
[Ian] Your stove has a UI.
So what conventions are out there in the world
that you should take advantage of?
You don't want someone to think too much about heating a pan.
But then, sometimes there are opportunities to improve things.
Maybe it's about adding options that make sense.
So, I have a toaster
that has a button that says "A bit more" on it.
It literally says, "A bit more."
Totally get why you would need that, right?
'Cause that's... that's part of the user experience of making toast.
Now, as a designer, there are costs to that, because now you added a new button.
Is it worth it? Is it actually valuable?
Is it something that people use, or is it just sort of superfluous,
you know, and just, like, maybe sell some toasters.
[chuckles]
That's all part of the experience, thinking about the conditions
and the context.
And then how do you work within those constraints to make that task
as easy and pleasurable as possible?
-[Ian] Have a good day. -See you in a hundred years.
A hundred years?
Instagram is a product used by a billion people every month,
and we've been around for eight years.
Being at the center of so many connections and memories
really adds to the sense of responsibility we have.
Instagram is a social place that you go to share photos and see photos of friends.
-Hi, everybody. -Everyone...
Hey, guys. I feel like it's been a while since I've actually spoken on here.
[Robbie] But I think that our identities today
are increasingly mediated through our devices.
And if you're a business,
or if you're a brand, or you're a celebrity,
a lot of your identity is bound up with your Instagram.
Instagram's all about showcasing the things that other people are creating.
And so our job as designers, in a lot of ways,
is to give them the tools they need to express themselves
and then get out of the way.
[man] The app isn't just about content,
it's actually about, like, forming strong relationships with
the people that you're connected to on the platform
as well as the things that you're most interested in.
[Ian] We're pretty rigorous about thinking through
how I use Instagram versus how you might use Instagram.
[woman] Eugene, do you love us?
[Robbie] Imagine being in charge of implementing change for a billion people,
including really powerful people.
Like, I can't imagine the weight that that is.
I think it's important to understand that this field,
call it product design, UX design, UI design,
is really young,
and it's also an amalgamation of lots of things that have come before it.
[male announcer] A computer is a lifeless, mindless collection of hardware,
but it can be given life of a kind.
[Ian] In the early days of computing,
you had people thinking about human factors,
thinking about what it means for a human to use tools.
[man] Computers were these giant mainframes.
One K of memory might come in, like, on a cart with dry ice.
And too, you'd have to hold down, like, a button
and then tap it with your nose to, like, make it work, like...
that wasn't-- that wasn't hyperbole, that's just how it was.
[Ian] People who were designing the first operating systems,
the first bits of software, were coming from research backgrounds
with an expertise in human factors.
[electronic beeping]
[Ian] Trying to understand people and machines
and what are the different things you need to consider?
[Steve Jobs] Extensive user tests have shown that a user
can learn how to use a Lisa application in 22 minutes.
By simply using the mouse,
the user can move an arrow around on the screen and simply point.
[Aza] My father was Jef Raskin,
the guy who created the Macintosh Project at Apple.
Jef introduced the idea of click and drag,
which now seems so obvious in retrospect that you would, like,
point to something, click, and move it.
But that as a gesture didn't exist.
[Ian] You had companies like Apple trying to bring together liberal arts,
so people who are amazing graphic artists,
like Susan Kare, who could come in and design icons.
This is a new medium that offers great control turning off.
There's thousands of little dots in... [voice echoes]
[Ian] And then you kind of fast forward a bit to, say,
-the early days of the web... -[computer] You've got mail!
...and the understanding of what was expected of designers
was not just media designers or graphic designers,
but you actually had these titles like "information architect,"
because the web was about information,
and you had to think about how you present that.
[computer] Goodbye.
Back in college, the consumer internet was just getting started.
College campuses were some of the first places to have access.
So, the way to get access to that was to go to the computer lab
and stay there as long as possible.
For me, that was staying there until three o'clock in the morning
on a regular basis,
just playing with stuff and exploring design.
And so I actually created my first website.
Both great and awful, I'd say.
Um...
-[man] What was the site for? -What was it for?
I mean, just to say, "I know how to build a website," I guess.
[chuckling]
-[interviewer] There it is. -It's pretty awesome. And awful.
Ian Spalter is somebody who incorporates design
into every level of the business process, of the creative process,
and the product process.
The work that Ian did on the FuelBand was a hugely important milestone.
The FuelBand was Nike's take on the fitness tracker,
and it was arguably the most compelling take
when it launched in the beginning of 2012.
[Ian] Nike was interested in helping everyone become more active.
And it was a project
that was based around a new piece of hardware that was being developed.
And this hardware was going to be essentially like a pedometer.
And at this time, pedometers were like this Scarlet Letter thing.
It wasn't something you wanted to wear.
And so what we wanted to do is set out to make it fun,
and it would have the Nike stamp on it,
so it would be something you'd want to wear all the time.
We worked across everything from thinking about
how you configure this thing and set it up
to the actual visual brand,
what it looked like from the app standpoint or on the web.
[Robbie] And the FuelBand was one of the first activity trackers
to implement goal-setting,
individual feedback that would show how you were progressing towards that goal.
And you get that immediate reward.
[Robbie] One of the things that Ian and his team were able to do
that nobody else did at the time
was they created a system that allowed people to improve their habits.
[woman] The idea of tracking your progress
was really within the domain of elite athletes.
So, Nike Plus was the first time that the quantified self
really became a mainstream idea.
[Robbie] The FuelBand really helped create the market that Apple went on to dominate.
The DNA made its way into the Apple Watch,
and it's how people use the devices in their daily lives.
We had a lot of fun with, like, making this fun.
Personally, I'm really proud of it
because it's something that my parents ended up actually using.
And it's something that... a product they found really valuable
in terms of helping them, uh... become more healthy.
And also for them to understand what I actually did every day.
-It still works. -[woman chuckling]
Yeah, when ours died, we went out and got replacements on eBay.
[Donna] One of the things that we used to give Ian for his birthday
was just a blank, black bound book
and put the year in.
And he loved it.
So, he used to draw all the time.
And my brother used to say, "Look at that forehead!
He's gonna be brilliant!"
-[Gary] "He's gonna be a genius." -[Donna] "He's gonna be a genius!" Yeah.
Because he has like a... We call it a five head, you know?
-And so, uh... he was right. -[Gary chuckling]
[Ian] When I start a new project, the first thing I do is to define the problem,
to understand the "why" of what we're trying to do
and what is the thing we're trying to solve for?
Travel back in time a little bit to around...
I think it was after iOS 7.
Pretty much every application had flattened out their app icon.
Instagram did not. They wanted to do it for the right reasons.
Turns out that right reason was me showing up to actually take it on!
My first reaction was, like, "No!"
But Instagram knew that it had already evolved from where it started
and it was time to signal that change was coming.
[man] Ian's first projects were to redesign the app,
make it more modern,
and redesign our logo.
I want to be really clear on something. I hated both of these projects.
I didn't want them to happen.
I designed the original logo. I designed the original app.
He was like, "We're gonna need a room, and we're gonna need to hole up,
and you're not gonna see anything from us for three months."
And I'm like, "Can't do that.
We need results. How about a week?"
[Ian] The first step was
looking at what existed at that moment.
It's this very round shape,
it's got these very candy-like features in the lens.
And the color is almost brown like...
like a teddy bear or something, you know?
Then on top of the teddy bear, you got a rainbow.
It's like, what's not to love?
How do you go beyond that?
Where do you... What's important about this?
What is actually essential?
[Kevin] I remember they blacked out the windows.
They say that was because
they wanted the mood to be right.
I'm pretty sure they just didn't want me seeing what they were doing.
So, an exercise I did was I just had everyone
in our kind of weekly company meeting,
and I said, "All right, everyone, you have ten seconds
to draw the existing Instagram logo from memory. Go."
So, everyone kind of...
That, maybe they put the top hat in there.
And then they got the... Whatever, right?
What was interesting is the range of stuff you got.
And you get some fun things that look like keyholes,
and, you know, fried eggs.
And, like, a whole range of stuff. [chuckling]
But it was helpful for us as input
to understand, "Oh, wait, actually, like, this rainbow thing
is starting to pop through in it."
Like, we kind of knew that this top section was gonna be important.
We knew that the, um...the actual lens was gonna be important.
But the rainbow popped out as something that
was really baked into people's memory.
You look at some of our early evolutions, like, we kind of started here,
uh, just kind of flattening out the existing app icon.
And we just felt like we were just creating bootlegs of...
of what existed, and weren't getting somewhere better.
And then you start to see us getting back down to basics
and figuring out what's the actual shape of this thing?
You kind of scan to look for something that's just interesting,
um, that stays with you,
that looks beyond just, like, a bunch of shapes thrown together.
This is, like, upside down.
[chuckles] This one's funny.
That's it. [chuckles]
But you make a lot of bad stuff.
And that's just-- that's part of the process.
[Kevin] I remember walking in,
and the walls are just...
plastered with every variant of logo you could possibly imagine.
We knew that this rainbow bit
was a part of the existing app icon.
And so this idea of having multiple colors
came from that, and kind of started sampling colors.
Started playing with, "Okay, what if we don't just go with one solid color?
What if we-- What if we actually start to blend colors?"
I think, at first, I was gravitating towards this guy,
who was kind of a cute little, you know, raccoon-looking thing.
When we applied color to it, though,
it also was pretty educational,
because now you've got these more complicated shapes
on a way more complicated background
and they kind of fight or just do too much,
where the balance between having a really simple form
with a lot of color felt better.
[high-tempo electronic music playing]
[laughs] I probably remember everything that happened that day.
I remember being in a dark conference room at the end of the day
uh, with a bottle of tequila, probably. [laughing]
I was like, "You guys spent three months
showing me a square in a circle?"
You know?
Then there was... Uh, I think it was an Adweek article.
It was, like, "The worst design decision ever."
And Ian was like, "It's okay."
You had the world saying one thing, then your gut telling you something else.
[Ian] You learn pretty fast how quick Internet trolls work
when you launch something like this.
There was this gif of, uh... this kid
who was, like... like, has a mullet,
and he's doing stuff on the computer.
And it always ends with him, like, putting a thumbs up.
And they were kind of jabbing at us for doing the gradient
as if it was like a simple gradient. [chuckles]
But at the end of that, it stuck.
And can you imagine Instagram in any other way today?
Talk about change and people not liking change,
but, in a matter of a few years, it's gone from
a couple hundred million people to over a billion.
And that is a huge testament to the work that he's done there.
So, in addition to simplifying the app icon,
they also simplified the app itself.
Ian came in and stripped everything down.
Took out all the color, made everything a lot simpler-looking.
And the big effect that had was it made the photos
the center of the user experience.
[woman] If I can't go to your app
and in five seconds know what to do, you've got a big problem.
That's the power of really good UX.
[Ian] Because computing has become so much more physical, in a way,
it's like you're actually touching things.
The real world, the physical world, has gravity.
It has momentum.
And so the expectations of how things should be able to respond
to you taking actions on these screens, it's different now.
It's a higher level of expectation. How should it feel?
What should the feedback be? How quickly should it move?
There's a lot of these nuances in moments between the main moments.
You think about any sort of transition that you see in our app today,
like, maybe it's the cube transition on stories.
Like, why is that important? You could have just, like, cut.
[whirring]
When you're watching a film, right, like, what does that...
Hard cuts versus a-- a wipe or a fade,
that kind of changes the emotional quality of that film.
So getting that feel right is something that we really place a high premium on.
And so there's a whole team of people to think about those things
and make decisions to try to make that as great an experience as possible.
We call our designers "product designers,"
and the reason why we have that definition is because
it's not even just about the user experience.
It's also about the overall product strategy.
What we are putting out there is a product.
And so it helps kind of orient people on what's expected of them.
-And some celebratory moments. -Yeah.
-Is that something? -Yeah. We actually have it.
[woman] We never want a feature to feel overwhelming
or look like we spent years on this.
And there's, like, massive features and so many buttons and...
That's very important to us, to make sure the app is simple.
[Ian] This group is fairly distinctive in that
we don't just think about frozen moments in time
and, like, layouts.
They're also thinking about how things move and connect and flow.
[man] A big maze of...
[Ian chuckling] This is...
This is insane, man.
[man] One of the things that I love about this prototype,
it's really satisfying to watch type...
-type in, you know? -[Ian] Mm-hm.
-Can you put that on here? -Yeah. Here.
-Should I put it in? -I'll just AirDrop it.
[woman] Designers here tend to prototype at very high fidelities,
because it gives us a better idea of what the end experience is.
We know that you can't really experience a design
when it's just flat pixels on a screen.
No one, you know, uses products like that.
They use things that they actually have to tap and use.
[man] Cool. So, today we're gonna talk about
some of the profile work that we've kicked off in H-Two,
um, that we're referring to as "Profile Neue."
[Ian] We have a team working on Profile.
And Profile is a cornerstone of Instagram.
It's kind of a space of co-ownership between people making the app
and the actual members of that community.
A profile is the representation of that person.
And so it's a tricky project for that reason.
Profile as a surface is starting to break.
When you add new features over time, things get more complicated
and the design becomes less and less elegant.
And so we want to take a step back
to make sure that its purpose is clear.
[Laurie] A redesign, getting it right is very important,
especially if you have a loved product.
You have all these famous examples throughout social media history
of redesigns and product decisions that have gone well and that haven't gone well.
Snapchat's redesign did not go well.
[woman] Snapchat is facing a wave of pushback from its users...
[woman 2] ...complaining the redesign is confusing and harder to use.
[man] A single tweet from the reality star
did not help the company's stock.
[woman 3] In the hours following her tweet,
shares fell more than six percent Thursday,
wiping out more than a billion dollars in value.
Some of the problems we see with Instagram Profile is that
in the past couple years, we've added a lot more different types of content.
So, we've got story highlights, stories, IGTV,
different actions for ways to get a little bit more connected to businesses.
So it's kind of just been a little bit crowded and everything feels it's, like,
trading off against each other.
Normally, when you do a redesign, as a designer,
you test it out a lot, give it to a lot of people.
Like, someone needs to sit over your shoulder
and watch how you interact.
[woman] For the first research study,
we broke down the components of a profile
and we separated them, uh, to get a very in-depth understanding
of what those individual components meant to the user.
[Ian] It needs to be something that gets embraced by the community.
When you put something out in the world on Instagram,
people need to eventually like it.
It has to do something better than what came before.
And so that's going to be challenging.
Whenever I think about my journey to design,
I think it just comes much more from a creative and inventive place.
Being interested in sci-fi, Star Wars, and, more importantly,
how those films were made and the creativity
that went into inventing something that didn't exist before,
like what ILM was doing.
I have images in my head right now of, like, the grainy footage
of scale models, and how they were set up, and the explosions,
and how they moved the camera.
You're seeing, basically, the magician's tricks.
You're seeing behind the curtain there.
-Everything's armed, ready to go. -Okay.
[Ian] I didn't want to just go out there and make my own films
and tell my own stories, necessarily.
But there was something about the mechanics of dreaming that stuff up
and creating this alternate reality.
It was just so captivating to me,
this idea of art and science coming together to create something magical.
You know, that was true with, like, ILM and Star Wars,
and I think it was also true with, uh, Apple.
-[audience cheering] -Thank you for coming.
[woman] You're welcome!
We're gonna make some history together today.
[cheering]
[Ian] When the iPhone came out, I think the first notable thing was
the way it had to be described.
-I believe he described it as an iPod... -...an iPod...
-...a phone... -...a phone...
and an Internet communications device.
-This is one device. -[cheering]
Smartphones up until then, the face of them had a screen up top,
and the bottom two-thirds were dominated by this physical QWERTY keyboard.
The iPhone turned the entire front of the phone into one big screen.
If the entire front of the phone is one big screen,
how do you interact with it?
You have to touch the screen.
So, you've got highly visual, highly tactile,
and the combination of those two things mean that it's also highly adaptable.
It gave third-party developers the chance to create applications for the phone
that Apple never would have had the time or the money to come up with on their own.
[Jobs] On the back, the biggest thing of note is a two-megapixel camera
built right in.
[Kevin] They networked a camera.
That's the fundamental transition that happened to allow Instagram to exist.
[Ian] Eventually, they put a GPS chip in it as well,
and that also unlocked new capabilities.
Actually, a proto version of Instagram was something called Burbn.
[Kevin] I went around to venture capitalists and said,
"Hey, I want to build something."
They were like, "What do you want to build?"
And I said, "Well, get this. It's a check-in app."
Uh... And at the time, everyone was building check-in apps,
and I was going to build, like, the 19th version of a check-in app.
Burbn was actually particularly good at allowing photo uploads,
and that was the thing that actually people found most interesting.
[Kevin] And before you knew it, Burbn
slowly transformed into what would become the beginning of Instagram.
They didn't try to do too much.
They picked one thing and they did it insanely well.
[Ian] Camera phone photos were not of great quality at that point.
But by helping people make small creative decisions,
they were able to create something that they felt like
was worth putting out into the world.
[Laurie] They added these filters. That meant they'd wanna share their photos,
because they looked better and they felt almost like a postcard.
I think we had 25,000 people sign up on the first day,
and that was more users than I had seen
on any service that I worked on to that point.
[Ian] That idea of creativity being born through constraints is a powerful one,
and it's one that I think Instagram brought to millions,
then tens of millions, then hundreds of millions of people.
Facebook snapped up a tiny little company called Instagram for one billion dollars.
It has just 13 employees.
Tonight, Instagram is worth 12 times more than Kodak.
[man] So, tell me about this thing called Instagram.
[chuckles]
Yeah. Well, I-- I knew about Instagram only as a photo site.
At that time, it was-- people were sharing photos. That's all I knew about it
when Ian moved to Instagram.
And I didn't get the concept. I don't... I mean, I really didn't.
I really... So, photos? Okay.
You know, I really didn't understand...
how popular it had... it is, and how popular it has become.
I would say, "I just don't understand why you would just look at photos
and be, like, "Oh!"
-Gets a little... boring after a while. -And we're old.
And even though I say I don't look at it that often,
I think I must look at it about an hour or two a day.
-That's too much! -Even though I say I don't,
-and we say we don't... -Mm-hm.
we're still on it for, you know, probably more than we should be.
[station announcement in Japanese]
[Ian] I didn't travel much as a kid.
And it wasn't until I started working more professionally,
gettin' thrown out into these different parts of the world,
that I started to get windows into these other perspectives.
Like... like, what normal is in another place.
-[camera shutter clicks] -Maybe it's the flavor of potato chips
in London, right?
Or what a manhole cover looks like in Japan.
[shutter clicks]
As a designer, you're already tuned to look at those details.
But then to see how other people have dealt with that solution
is tremendously inspirational.
[shutter clicks]
It feels like it hacked my brain a bit
to just see reality from another angle, in a way.
-[server speaking in Japanese] -Hai.
[Ian] I actually went to Japan the first time with a research trip and I was like,
"Uh, what is this?"
When you think about the things we value,
the Instagram design team, and things I value personally...
-[shutter clicks] -...around attention to detail and craft,
there's probably very few cultures that hold that up as high as Japanese culture.
It's a place where all the details kind of just tickle you.
Everything feels pretty considered.
And you're just soaking all that in. So, it's stimulating in a different way.
I try to get to the point where you're just there
and you're actually just letting it flow through you,
like, what your eyes and ears... and what you're smelling,
you're able to let that go through you, that's what you want.
[birdsong]
It's less about, "Oh, eureka. I have this amazing idea about this next thing."
It's, like, no, that's not what you want.
You want it to be able to flow through you,
and that will create the space in your mind,
so that when you come back to those things,
there's more room to breathe and to see
different connections than you saw before.
[cable car bell ringing]
[Ian] What are we looking at today?
[Diana] Profile redesign stuff, Project Neue again.
-Mm-hm. [chuckles] -Um...
Yeah, so we've been spending time exploring different directions
and wanted to show you the breadth of what we've done so far.
-Great, let's do it. -[Diana] Cool.
[Joey] Bar Tab is kind of closer to what we have today.
So, this is just kind of taking what we have, this, like, familiar lock-up
and seeing what we can do to kind of make some of these abilities a little better.
So, Sheety Bio. So, this one is, uh...
what if you literally put content first?
So, this is showing, like, it actually starts more like a gallery.
Do you guys have anything on device that we could play with?
[Joey and Diana] Yeah.
-[Ian] Can I try one of those Sheety ones? -[Joey] Yeah.
[Ian] Making large changes to a big platform
is always going to be uncomfortable.
And so you have o just make sure that you are
not making completely emotional decisions.
Yeah.
It's interesting to have this layered feel to it.
-[Joey] We also have this B-sides-- -[Ian] Let's run through 'em.
I'm curious to see how crazy you guys...
-[Diana] Yeah. -Go for it.
-[Diana] Um... -Oh!
-[laughing] -It was like... basically, like,
what if your profile was just more like a story composer
-and you could put what you want anywhere? -Okay.
-[Joey] Toss a gif up there. -[Ian] Oh, okay.
I don't think this one's really gonna work,
but we thought it was interesting to explore.
Yeah, I don't think this one will work either, but...
but it's important to... find the edges, right?
You gotta fall off the edge to know when you've gone too far.
So I'm glad you guys are pushing on it.
[Ian] There's a bit of defining the constraints,
understanding what people need.
Like, what are problems in the world
that we are in a position to solve, that we have the permission to solve?
I didn't go outside a lot as a kid.
Maybe because I was shy or my mom didn't want me playing with kids in the street,
or I don't know what.
But I was very attracted to computers
and kind of just gravitated to them, like,
if it was in a room, I just kind of floated over to it.
The first computer that was mine
was a Commodore 64.
♪ Are you keeping up with the Commodore? ♪
♪ 'Cause the Commodore is keeping up with you ♪
♪ In a world of fun and fantasy ♪
♪ And ever-changing views ♪
[Ian] This was a birthday gift. I think it was sixth grade,
and my dad got it for me.
I just remember the moment of waking up, uh...
and seeing it there, and just being
-in awe of it. -[whirring]
-I'll never forget that morning. -[bleeping]
You had to basically type in a special code
to load any software.
I still remember the line--
You had to type in "Load,
quote, star, quote, comma, eight, comma, one."
That's how you-- After you put the floppy disk in! [chuckling]
That's what you had to do to get anything to work.
And there was something about it that felt so unique.
It's the possibilities, you know, of creation
and just seeing that potential
that the thing on screen could be controlled.
It's not just something being broadcast to you, but you can actually change that.
[Ian] Look.
-Oh, man. -[Gary] Let me turn the light on.
[Ian] 64K memory.
[chuckles]
[Ian] What actually has mattered a lot in my career
is not just talent or how hard I work or anything like that.
It's also about the support
you have from people along your path.
It certainly starts from my parents, right?
Giving me access to computing early on.
-[Gary] You wanna try-- plug it in? -[Ian] Let's see.
[Gary] Ian gravitated towards anything technological.
What-- Whatever technical issues anyone had in the building we lived in,
they would come to the door, knock on the door, "Is Ian home?
We need Ian upstairs. He's gotta hook up this,
-he's gotta hook up that." -[Donna] The cable.
Telephones.
Everybody's knocking on the door, "Is Ian home? We need help."
[Ian] I'm of mixed race, right? So, my dad is white,
he's half-Jewish, half-Sicilian.
My mom's black.
And so I think that's impacted just who I am as a person.
The fact that I have to think about what my identity is
as a black person navigating this world.
In terms of the places that I've chosen to work,
there are not a whole lot of people that look like me.
When you're a black person working in these environments,
there can be both a high bar and a low bar for you.
You're in situations where people don't expect a lot from you,
but, at the same time, the price for failure seems very, very high.
Sometimes you can use that as motivation
to go above and beyond, you know, just to kind of prove something.
Other times it can be kind of crushing, doubt yourself.
I think that helps build my sense of empathy for people,
and I think it helps my awareness of the needs
of people outside of Silicon Valley.
When you're designing products, you have to think about how people think,
how they approach each other, how they approach abstract concepts,
like this...
touching on glass. [chuckles]
Seems to be a benefit that the stories ring is always there.
-[Joey] Yeah. -So, you have
this co-mingling, even, so you can kind of browse through,
you can jump into the story.
-That's kind of a new... dynamic. -Totally. Totally.
[Ian] A couple of years ago, I started listening to Marc Maron's podcast.
And what I appreciated about the podcast is it got into
different comedians' development processes
and how they put together an act.
[Marc] Do you write in jokes? Do you think in jokes?
[Dave] Well, it's -- it's not so much the writing of the joke,
it's the listening to them bomb, and then trying to rewrite them.
Listen to enough of these stories
and you hear about how iterative the process is.
[scattered applause]
It helped me see points of connection
between what it is that me and my teams do every day
and what comedians do every day.
Stand-up comedians are in a position where
they have to come up with ways to make people laugh.
They may work on the same bit multiple times a night
in different clubs telling the same joke a slightly different way,
taking that feedback, adjusting it until it's tuned.
[woman] I don't want to tell you guys how long she's been single.
But if you take the number of cats she has
and you divide it by the bottles of wine she drinks a day,
it's 20 years.
-She's been single for 20 years. -[laughter]
[Ian] And so it's really interesting to have a laugh be a data point,
because that's something emotional.
The laugh is a metric.
And when I bring it back to what we do, there are plenty of areas in the product
where we try out things to a limited audience,
and we get back data to understand how that audience has used a certain feature.
And then we make changes based off that feedback.
But we don't just look at the numbers.
It's really important for us to keep our eyes open.
We also talk to people and we travel all over the world
to understand how people are using Instagram.
And so it's actually one of my favorite parts about taking public transportation.
You can look over someone's shoulder and you see what they're using.
We see unexpected things, like patterns that they follow.
[Christine] In the US, we see a lot of selfies, a lot of text posts.
It's quite different in a place like Japan.
There, we've seen a completely different use case.
So, there are less selfies and people are culturally different
in the way that they share.
[Ian] It's a product that people use all the time.
So, how does it fit in with the mix of other applications
that they may have on their device?
Have they cracked their phone recently?
There's lots of different considerations, given the scale of computing.
You know, the work he does affects many, many people, and that's true.
But if I think about that, it scares me.
-I wonder if Ian even thinks about it. -[both laugh]
Does he-- Does he think about it? That's a lot.
That's a lot of people.
Interaction design, at its core, is a psychological exercise.
If you've ever been scrolling through your Twitter feed or your Instagram feed,
you've noticed you don't hit the bottom.
That's a relatively new feature, called bottomless scroll.
And that was invented by a designer named Aza Raskin.
Which I feel like I have to forever atone for.
When I was thinking about infinite scroll,
like, the thought was...
I, as a designer, have failed
if I ask the user to make a choice they don't care about.
So, scrolling already means "I haven't seen what I want, show me more."
So, why bother having, like, little buttons at the bottom
that you click to show-- show more?
I as an individual designer doing human-computer interaction,
like, will happily make an infinite scroll.
But if I'm thinking at this higher level,
I would have known that that would remove the stopping cues,
just like when I'm drinking a glass of wine.
I stop drinking when I finish my glass, and I think, "Do I want more?"
Here, we're not giving people the stopping cue.
And so it's literally wasted hundreds of millions of human hours.
It's no longer enough as a designer
to think about the constraints of just one individual
using my product.
Instead, we have to think the fractal version up
to technology-society interaction.
We haven't really fledged that out as a field yet.
And now we're seeing that our technology not only distracts us,
but if you think about what Facebook does,
they build a little simulator of you.
They build one of these little simulators
for one-fourth of the human beings on Earth.
You are the product. You don't get the service for free.
You are handing over your data. You are being targeted.
This business model, especially with Facebook, led to...
the proliferation of fake news.
It led to misinformation being spread out there.
[overlapping news broadcasts]
You know, there's a fine line between micro-targeting, manipulation.
It's also allowing us to compare our fake, fabulous lives
to other people's fake, fabulous lives.
I think that can be problematic for a lot of us.
Because Facebook owns Instagram now,
there's been, I think, more pressure on Instagram.
And especially now with the pressure to make money,
especially with the pressure now of Facebook not doing as well as it was,
and Instagram kind of being, like, this golden child.
I think the challenge for Instagram
is going to be staying Instagram.
[Ian] I think the focus on people and human needs
has been something throughout my work.
Not just communicating a message, but you're also trying to connect
with a human need or desire, something core to you,
who they are as people.
All right, what's this one about?
Uh, so, this is a couple of different things.
The first thing we wanted to dig into
is this problem that we heard a lot about, vanity metrics.
When we talked to people about their profile,
we got feedback that they didn't necessarily like
the numbers at the top of the profile that said
how many followers you have, and how many people are you following,
because they felt some sort of social pressure.
So right now, with the current design, um,
the metrics that we have, the follower and following count,
is prominent, right up at the top.
-[Ian] Yes. -And that causes a lot of anxiety
in terms of popularity,
having a lot of friends and their self-worth.
And so by placing the metrics a little bit down below,
we're kind of humanizing it
and dulling down that anxious experience of the ratios next to each other.
So, it would be a big step to, like, downgrade overall followers.
Do you feel like that's-- that's a net good thing?
[Diana] That's actually our biggest concern
with the launch of the redesign.
This is probably the most sensitive thing.
That's like a drop-the-mic move, isn't it?
I interviewed one of the founders of Twitter recently,
and his biggest regret, he said, was putting your follower count on Twitter.
I was like, "Why?"
And he said, "It just put us down a weird path. Like, incentive."
Like, you know, when it talks about incentivizing people
to post for likes, or post for followers.
I mean, I think that tension keeps me up at night, honestly.
The benefit that we have is we can set those principles
and make them really clear to people.
[Ian] The pace of change in the past 20 years
has been pretty tremendous when it comes to communication technologies.
But we also know it's just the beginning.
So, I think it's going to be important to have a clear point of view
on where we want these tools to take us.
At the core, Instagram is about visual communication.
So I feel like that's something that there will always be space for,
that we're well-positioned to continue to plan.
-How close are we to be building out... -[Diana] Mm-hm.
...this version, or some version of this, for any sort of first test?
[Diana] Yeah, we're actually able to phase these different tests out to see
how it affects the ecosystem soon.
So, we took out the Sheety Bio, as well as the Card Shark and the Bar Tab.
And what we found was that the Bar Tab was most favorable.
Only because it was not too different from what they're normally used to seeing,
and it really helped them better understand the profile
compared to their existing experience.
[Ian] The design we ended up moving forward with
and evolving from is called "Bar Tab."
We've moved the profile photo and increased the size of it.
We've changed the prioritization of the metrics
that currently exist in the profile and made that a little bit less important.
We've made the descriptive copy that people put in on their profile
more important.
And then we've also evolved and created a new system for buttons.
A little more than a coat of paint, you know, but not a full, like,
renovation down to the studs.
But, you know, design is never done.
It's something that will continue to evolve.
The first launch may be just the first step.
I've really benefited from working in this space
and seeing these technologies evolve.
It's given me a tremendous perspective.
These tools are certainly transforming us,
and we don't yet know where they're going to take us.
How many you going for?
-Five. -Five? All right, we'll do five.
All right, ready? Here you go. Ready? Give me one.
Good. Two.
For my kids, I think the one thing that is certain
is that things will be uncertain.
I think that their ability to deal with change will be pretty critical
to how they are able to survive as people.
Up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up!
Right now, my kids don't have phones still, even my 12-year-old,
and he actually has been explicit about saying,
“I actually don't think I want one.”
Maybe this is a part of us working through
what it is to have these devices.
[seabirds calling]
There's nothing that says that we can't come up with
these new kind of expectations and social standards.
We are inundated with so much information
that you need to give yourself the space
to experience the world in an unmediated way.
To just be in a place
and use your natural given senses, no tools.
It actually clears out a lot of the noise
and gives me the capacity to either be creative
or be a better dad or a better husband or a better boss.
The ability to zoom out for a minute
and get that clarity of perspective,
it's one of the best things that we're able to do.