Captions on Instagram Reels
Rethinking the captioning experience on Instagram Reels because accessibility is for everybody.
February – March 2022
Project Overview
My Role
Product Design student as part of Useful School
Team
Solo Project
Disclaimer:
I do not work for Instagram, and the views in this case study are strictly my own. As a budding designer, I acknowledge that my vision for this project may be overly ambitious and at times reliant on assumptions of business goals. In a perfect world, I'd be working alongside the Instagram team with direct access to these resources to guide my work. Until then, this case study is meant to be an exploratory learning experience.
The Problem
Social courtesy practices make it that most people have their phones on silent–no one wants to be surprised by random audio playing from a shared video, Reel, TikTok, etc. So captions and subtitles are really important for engaging audiences, and not just as a means for checking off accessibility standards for hard of hearing or deaf folks.
Currently, Instagram’s Reels interface doesn’t make it clear how features are grouped, let alone where the captions feature is located within the different groups.
After a lot of tapping randomly around, I finally found the captions “sticker” feature under the “stickers” icon. Captions aren’t available for Stories, so it’s not intuitive to look here.
There are a few options to stylize the captions, but none that are quite standardized and some disappear with the audio that can’t be paused, and others don’t. Overall confusing.
I initially tried looking under the audio icon but didn’t find captions. The interface and options here are also confusing.
Research and Analysis
My initial research revealed a strong argument for adding captions to video content to increase audience engagement, as opposed to a feature specifically for people with disabilities.
According to a 2019 Verizon Media and Publicis Media study examining the relationship between video viewing, sound and captions:
“50% of consumers said captions are important because they watch videos with the sound off.”
“80% of consumers are more likely to watch an entire video when captions are available”
“When captions are available, 37% of viewers said they are encouraged to turn the sound on because the videos seem more interesting, and 29% said that even with the sound off, they were better able to understand the video because of the captioning.”
I interviewed a few folks on Usertesting.com about their experience using captions in Instagram versus other popular social media platforms, and they had some thoughts too:
“I would put captions under audio rather than under the sticky note icon, which is what I essentially use for GIFs”
“Using captions on Tiktoks makes your content more likely to go viral”
Persona
To start building out my solution, I drafted a user persona of who I’d be designing for:
Watching social media content on their phone at home where they live with 2 roommates. It’s early in the morning and they’re sitting in the kitchen eating breakfast while watching content. They have their sound turned off so it won’t disturb their roommates. They often have their phone sounds turned off because it’s distracting to their roommates and when they’re working.
Avid social media content creator, maybe in marketing or creative
Loves to create engaging content using all kinds of new features: location tags, text-to-speech, GIFs, captions, hashtags, etc. Always wants to know the latest features to optimize content for the algorithms
Consumes a lot of content as well, across streaming, social media, news, etc
Neurodivergent and prefers to have captions/subtitles on while watching any video content
Apps they’re also using, Snapchat, IG, Tiktok, Twitter, YouTube
Tiktok’s captioning flow is clearly labeled and accessible. I do see a lot more users using captions, which infers that the feature is easy to use.
YouTube has auto captioning but it’s notoriously bad at actually capturing and timing captions w the audio
Snapchat News stories have captions but are only visible when your phone’s audio is turned off. Once your volume is on, the captions disappear
They get frustrated when experiences are not similar/seamless across apps. They see that apps are essentially copying each other at this point, so why not copy good UI/UX
…and what their user journey currently looks like.
After doing research and mapping out user journeys based on testing and interviews, I noted parts of the experience that caused the most friction with the app’s captioning experience. The insights showed:
Hidden Feature: Most users initially tried looking for captions under the audio icon. Instagram Reels’ caption feature is hidden as a “sticker” which makes it confusing to find.
Non-intuitive Experience: Most users had a hard time using the captioning feature and editing for typos.
Sketches
After looking at points of friction and what other apps are successfully creating a streamlined captioning experience, I sketched out some rough ideas for the user flow.
I then created low fidelity wireframes in Figma to think through the flow and further develop the interface elements.
First Prototype
I created my first high fidelity prototype based on my initial wireframe sketches.
For my first time using Figma to create a prototype, I felt relatively okay with using all of the features and creating interactions.
User Feedback
After conducting interviews with users with my initial prototype I received the following comments:
“Getting to the captions feature could be more intuitive, maybe having a call-out to its new placement. Editing captions feels intuitive and easy.”
“Reels is already so hard to use and it’s hard to know what tools are where. Captioning is definitely a tool creators need that product developers overlook, so this is helpful.”
“It would be really interesting to have captions that also translate to other languages.”
Revised Prototype
Based on the feedback I received,
• I created a notification for captions’ new location,
• a toast notification for when caption typos are made, and
• added a few more screens to complete the experience.
If I had more resources…
I would test the prototype on the live app and have engineers alter the algorithm to promote more Reels that use captions, and see if more users end up using captions.
I would also take a look at a language translation capability of captions. Whether that feature would be part of the operating system language settings or native to the app, and how it would look and work.