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Invisible patterns: designing ads as part of the user experience
While I was redesigning Instagram’s home screen based on neumorphism, I noticed that there were a lot of sponsored posts in my feed — 1 in 5 to be specific. Interestingly, I never paid any attention to them before, which led me to explore the topic a little bit more.
Firstly, I looked at my own experiences and tried to recollect my instances with the ads in my feed. As far as I could remember, I would just ignore them and it did not interfere with my normal use pattern of mindless scrolling. Perhaps, this might be why I never paid any attention to them.
Plus, it does not help that these ads look like any other posts in the feed with a small grey text stating that its sponsored.
To look at other’s experiences, I quickly browsed through Instagram’s reddit and unsurprisingly, there were a few who had noticed the amount of ads in their feeds as well.
Although these posts are a year old, its still relevant as there hasn’t been any changes to the ads despite the introduction of countless new features — every fifth post is still a sponsored post.
From a business point of view, the revenue earned via sponsored posts are essential to maintain and develop the platform. Therefore, I doubt that these will ever go away. Anyhow, are these really that frustrating for an average user?
More importantly, do sponsored posts in the home feed take away from the core user experience of the app?
Personally, I don’t think so. If it wasn’t for the side project, I honestly would not even be writing about this now.
As a matter of fact, there are plenty of posts from accounts that I actively follow, which I scroll past immediately, especially brands and celebrities. Perhaps, this behaviour pattern explains how we might have grown accustomed to sponsored posts.
Through repeated exposure to celebrities’ posts and rapid scrolling behaviour, our brains have adapted to efficiently skimming through vast amounts…
