Instagram Watch & Browse
Creating a new, immersive video-first ad experience for Reels that would shorten the user conversion journey and make it easier and more delightful to shop on Instagram.
In recent years, video has become the top performing as well as most common type of content format on Instagram. In 2023, my team began an effort to optimize the video viewing experience by auditing, identifying, and improving upon outdated flows and behaviors. How might we better prioritize video viewing, engagement, and creation?
Data has recently suggested that users were having a particularly hard time shopping on video ads, mainly because users wanted to concurrently watch the ad as well as explore the website in order to make the most informed decision. In fact, we knew that 1 in 5 respondents report product information as a key driver for understanding an ad. Without this, the CTA felt like a big pressure and we saw our conversion rates regress. How might we make shopping on video ads more seamless and helpful? How might we make product information from the official website more accessible?
The answer I proposed was to leverage an existing high-intent action: media-tap. After analyzing recent user feedback, I found that users were expecting more from their interaction with video ads on Instagram, and this was a moment in their flow that we were not addressing well. Optimizing this behavior would not only resolve inconsistencies in our design system, it would capitalize on an action that we knew could result in a user being 9x more likely to convert. For our business and our users, this was the right solution space to work on. Therefore, my hypothesis was: surfacing the advertiser’s website on media-tap will make it shopping on video ads on Instagram more accessible and valuable.
I created multiple iterations to explore placement and animation and collaborated with my engineering and product partners to perfect the final designs. After navigating multiple reviews, we arrived at a shippable candidate that is now live. The core of this concept was to have the CTA destination (often the website) be easily and seamlessly available in-app, appearing as a bottom sheet popup whenever the video was tapped. That way, users could enjoy the content of the ad creative as well as consider their options to shop.
I also designed for different ad objectives, creating custom bottom sheets with unique behaviors and elements, depending on the final destination specified by the advertiser.
As predicted, this feature consistently brings value in two ways: (1) increased nativity, as tapping on a video ad opens an immersive viewer, similar to organic videos on Feed and (2) a shorter path to conversion, enabling users to browse while continuing to watch the ad. In addition, the success of this design allowed me to continue expanding it across different ad objectives outside of IAB such as supporting app downloads, profile views, and more.