Thursday November 8th, 2012
After using Instagram for some time. I have watched the app slowly collapsing itself into a heap of manure.
The mistakes they are doing are so glaring obvious. I think fame and money has gone to the corners of the developers’ head and lauded around there for days after selling out to Facebook.
The fault is the UI layout.
Seeing the blue highlight in the middle is a misdirection thinking you are ready to take a picture where if you look to the first left button, you see a darker shade of black indicating you are on the home feed. I always make the mistake here that the camera is ready to go and I can’t get it out of my system. Tapping the camera button reveals a paler blue glow doesn’t quite help my line of vision.
In camera mode, this is where Instagram now lacks the understanding to utilise the new screen height on the iPhone 5 or rather, not doing anything unique with this.
This is a sorry state of design. Nothing intuitive is happening here. It never feels like you are in camera mode, instead it feels like using camera app from iOS v1.
Going past this stage reveals the shot (after selecting), the filters are revealed. It doesn’t feel so great knowing the most popular camera app lets itself down here.
Writing a caption isn’t a problem and having to inflate this box with hash tags is cumbersome. Most of the time, the tags supposedly remembered disappear leaving myself having to input them again. If this is a longstanding bug, it would have been fixed by now.
The share board need a iMessage function. I know the older generation doesn’t have a Facebook/twitter account and would love to see a small message revealing our latest daily snaps.
The explore section is the most strangest part of the app. I never quite work out what am I looking here? Number of top likes? Number of comments? This is the area I never look at all because it reminds me a lot of Twitter trends. Garbage land.
Switching over to love/comment part reveals the new Instagram notification:
I made the mistake of tapping on it to reveal my profile. Nothing happened. It’s the link highlight triggering off my expectation that something is going to appear.
Instagram is an app that I like using for quick snaps. It is a modern day Polaroid for the digital generation. However, it is now marred by twitter-style spam, people not understanding how to use the square format for photos where they end up using letterbox style, awful filters, random self promotion to look at their “professional website” (that would be Facebook) along with lack of direction and styling throughout the app.
Now Instagram has been acquired by Facebook, what is their next direction? Are there going to be changes? Or Mark Zuckerberg will merge it completely into the murky depth of the social network?
Only time will tell and for now, they need to revamp the entire UI outlook to save its own hipster madness.