Engaging the business strategy, product marketing, and data science teams, I researched sales funnel behavior and gained insight into direct-to-consumer brand shopping strategies in order to deliver Shopping Insights on Instagram.

Direct to consumer brands invest heavily in their content, art direction, and strategy across social media. They’ve always been quick to adopt new Instagram features, and crave any opportunity to better understand customer’s experiences with the brand.

By collaborating with marketing, I was able to better interpret how product feedback loops can take place across multiple interactions on Instagram, for example, comments under posts or direct messages on stories lead to measurable outcomes for businesses. This type of 1:1 connection is invaluable and is a step in the funnel to drive users to convert.

Through strong collaboration with the data team, I was able to gain empathy for business owners selling and building on Instagram. Data laid the foundation for all of my design work  (It also didn’t hurt that this team was incredible at making sense of the most complex math I have ever seen). 

Providing me insight into:

- The amount of SMBs on the platform
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- The amount of products they tagged on average on an individual post
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- Providing the frequency that businesses were tagging products

By requesting specific metrics I formed a hypothesis of why business owners turn to Instagram to drive sales using tactics to unify the marketing and sales funnel. These metrics were also critical to informing how to shape the product experience minimum and maximum states. 

While design ideally accomplishes all tasks at once, Instagram had an experimentation-first methodology approach to their product delivery cycles. In the design process this translated to providing a breadth of solutions to engineering - who would ensure that among the solutions selected there would be multiple solutions that could be designed, built, and A/B tested for performance.

By creating design explorations that explored a minimum and maximum state it allowed me to incorporate feedback heard in research while considering how these solutions could be built by engineering. 

Highlight Interactions In The Funnel - In the most minimal state, I explored leading with the interactions of the funnel for example: tap to reveal, clicks to the product detail, and clicking “view website” in the future this would be embedded checkout on Instagram 

Leading with Product Detail Images - in more expanded views, I highlighted the product detail page image alongside revealed steps in the funnel

Creating A Shopping Insights Dashboard Experience - In then most expanded view of the designs I explored what it might look like to have a dedicated dashboard for Shopping insights & Analytics - this robust strategy would of course

I collaborated with product marketing to lead sessions with current small business users of shopping features on Instagram. I focused on creating an environment where small business owners could share their experiences and talk through the ways they leverage Instagram to engage their audience and connect with potential customers. Specifically, my areas of interest concerned storytelling across interactions and selling.  

I ran sessions with both open-ended and guided questions — creating a healthy balance between discussing strategy and walking through a prototype. During the sessions, I recorded and synthesized feedback from participants, specifically quotes that would support the team’s product thinking and design decisions.

Takeaways from research included:

- Small businesses immediately understood the designs and were consistently able to decipher what the steps in the funnel translated to

- Small businesses emphasized the value of insights, especially when communicating with customers and mentioned that the most valuable insights were often qualitative

- While Shopping Insights at this level where valuable, they wanted more detail and spoke about their desire to have a product experience that expanded to desktop mentioning Google & Shopify Analytics as references that give them data in granularity, which was something they loved!

After completing the research sessions — I synthesized, distilled, and handed off to the larger product team which consisted of data scientists, product managers, product marketing, designers, engineers, and leadership to have insight into the way that small and medium sized businesses navigate through the product as the team worked on building Checkout on Instagram.