VSCO Photo Sharing
UX Redesign
Team: Phoenix Dalgarn, Makenzie Doyle, and Niko Valenzuela
The Brief
As Instagram leans more and more into sponsored ads and graphic/written user generated content, how might VSCO retain its existing social media experience while attracting new users who might be looking to bounce from Instagram?
Background
As part of our UX class our team was tasked by Kris Mendoza, Staff Product Designer at VSCO, to reimagine VSCO’s existing product to better attract new users while still maintaining its existing low profile social media experience.
VSCO is a photo focused app that has both photo editing and sharing features. The app tailors to creatives - illustrators, photographers, content creators - to create a place to collect and share images and inspiration. In 2019, the app was highly associated with the term “VSCO girl,” which was a stereotype perpetrated by other social media apps. This is due to the popularity of a filter you can place on photos using VSCO, specifically a warm filter called “California breezy.”
Initial Research
VSCO users are able to edit their photos manually or use basic presets, post photos to their feed, follow others, and favorite, repost or discover new content all within the app. Users are provided with an ad free experience, with VSCO making its money through a premium membership that offers users advanced editing tools, the ability to edit and post video, and layered photo montages. VSCO has 100 million registered users with less than half of the users active monthly. Of their registered users, only 2 million users are enrolled in the VSCO membership. With this data gathered, we began to compare competitor data and move into gathering further user data.
Competitor Benchmarking
Survey Results
Survey and Interview Data
Survey data was gathered with the majority of respondents being in the 15-25 age bracket with both former and current VSCO users as well as those who had never used the app before. 57% of respondents were female contrasting with VSCO’s majority male audience. An interesting note is that the majority of features respondents like in social media correlate with the main features of VSCO, whereas the typically disliked features are those that VSCO purposefully doesn’t feature. Despite this however, over 72% of respondents feel indifferent/negative to VSCO. Moving into the interviews we hoped to gain more information as to why this is.
During interviews a few common trends emerged. Many felt that when editing being locked out of all the premium filters was frustrating, Most of those interviewed listed the editing features as part of their primary use of VSCO, however only one user said they post on VSCO with the others saying they felt the “posting trend was dead, and seems pointless now”.
User Journeys
Doing user journeys allowed us to look at different perspectives of potential users. Different users will interact with VSCO very differently depending on their goals and needs, and this allowed us to identify further pain points allowing us to reassess our previous ideas and better understand the best way to move forward.
User Flows
This portion of our research allowed us to build out users would maneuver through VSCO. Doing this allowed us to think about how different users would interact with these features and helped to identify further pain points we had not found.
Pain Points
Limited variety of posting options.
Few options for community interaction.
Does not seem relevant to social media apps with lack of popular features.
Clunky user flow and membership promos everywhere.
Opportunities
Incorporate additional photo sharing features inspired by those found in popular social media apps today.
Create more opportunities for community interaction that VSCO currently lacks.
Reorganize how users interact with the premium features, allowing for a smoother journey through the app
The Solution
In order to stay relevant as a social media app, VSCO’s photo sharing features need to be expanded to better compete with the popular features provided by other social media apps today, while still the maintaining qualities that serve the “low-profile” feel of the app.
Our solution includes the ability for users to post multiple photos, a weekly photo prompt feature for users, and overall app wide modifications to streamline the user journey.
Together, these features will give more photo sharing power to users, create the opportunity for further community engagement across the platform, and correct pain points discovered for user navigation that frustrated users. Moodboards allow users to post multiple photos to show off the moodboard of their primary photo posted. Weekly Challenges offer a creative prompt for users to submit to or view submissions from those they follow, creating a more interactive community dynamic while leaving the decision of how much they want to engage with the community in the hands of the user.
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VSCO’s take on the ability to post multiple photos in a single post. When posting a photo the user may select additional photos to create and show off their Moodboard of the first photo posted.
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The new Weekly Challenge feature caters to the creative side of VSCO users. Each week a new photo prompt will be available and users may submit their own take on that weeks challenge. The prompt will be viewable on the main feed where the user can also view submissions by users they follow.
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The ease at which the user can navigate through VSCO to accomplish their goals directly impacts the users impression of the app as well as whether or not they will continue to use it. Discover will be reorganized in a more concise format allowing the user a larger variation in what can be found, in order to connect more with the larger VSCO community.
To be able to visualize different ways we could incorporate potential solutions, we made sketches of wireframes before making our low fidelity prototypes.
Sketches mainly focused on the addition of a stories feature, as we explored different ways it would appear in the app.
Sketches
From left to right: Home, Discover, Studio, Filters, Video, and Profile
Lo Fi Testing
During our first round of prototype testing, we were able to gain valuable insight as to how users felt about our proposed solutions.
Users enjoyed the idea of posting multiple photos at once, but felt that Moodboards felt too niche
When searching for Weekly Challenges, users expected to find it on Discover rather than the home feed
Not all users enjoyed the layout of some pages, struggling with the navigation
This information gave us a much stronger idea of new pain points for users as well as existing pain points that weren’t fully addressed yet. Moving forward, Moodboards instead became the new Snapshot function to appeal to a broader user base.
From left to right: Home, Discover, Weekly Challenge, Studio, Filters, and Profile
Hi Fi Testing
In Hi Fi prototype testing, we were able to get confirmation on the changes made between lo fi and hi fi prototypes.
Users reported that they enjoyed the flow throughout the app
The Weekly Challenge feature was positively received, with users stating that they would enjoy using the feature and checking out what other users were submitting
Users felt the layout with the profile and photo editing experiences still felt clunky compared to preferred apps like Instagram
Testing revealed to us that moving forward we still needed to:
Create a more streamlined layout and editing experience
Include options to view challenges in a gridded format so users were no longer stuck clicking through each individual challenge
Final Design
Left to right: Home, Discover, Weekly Challenge, Studio, and Profile
Weekly Challenges
Our first solution was to integrate a weekly challenge feature, where users can post pictures each week to match a prompt. The idea of this is to encourage group community engagement without pressure, there is no incentive nor anything to discourage posting to the theme, it would be solely based on the user’s discretion.
Users who you follow that post to the Weekly Challenge can be viewed on the home feed by selecting the VSCO logo in the top left corner. On the Discover page users will be able to view trending submission to the weekly challenge by VSCO users around the globe.
Snapshot
To add to the posting capabilities of VSCO, this feature gives users the option to post multiple photos in a collection called a “Snapshot.” The idea is to give users another opportunity for sharing photos similar to how most social media apps allow for multiple photos to be posted at once. This allows users posting on the VSCO feed to give followers a “snapshot” of their experience taking that photo, whether it be inspiration used, behind the scenes photos, or more photos from their day.
On the Snapshot page you can find additional photos, the caption, and prompts to follow the user. An image that is a Snapshot is indicated with a blue dot on the home feed.
App Wide Modifications
Across the interface, changes were made to make the flow easier, more consistent with the features we added, and less broken up with pages detailing membership features.
Takeaways
Trying to solve the problem of photo sharing in VSCO was a big undertaking, as there were many aspects we considered while working on this redesign. VSCO has a clearly defined goal of being an app for creators to find and share inspiration without the pressures of most social medias, so finding additional ways users could share photos while maintaining the fundamental aspects of the app required our solutions to be mindful of both what users would like to see and what VSCO as a business is trying to convey.
Looking Forward
Our vision for the future of VSCO is that the photo sharing options are expanded so that both current and new users feel compelled to use the app and all of its available features. Instead of simply copying the popular photo sharing features already put in place by its competitors, VSCO should strive to keep its feel consistent without limiting user interaction. Hopefully this will encourage additional engagement, if there can be features that accommodate the wishes of users without the negative social media aspects that VSCO strives to avoid.