In Ephemeral Narrative Systems’ Sociability Mediated by User Experience: A Case Study of Instagram Stories, de Souza Silva et al., discusses the importance of addressing UX/social mobility in these ephermal systems;, specifically Instagram stories.
The authors conducted three big experiments in which they tried to discover “Does the interface and interaction model of Instagram stories support the social interaction its users?”. In the first experiment, they used HCI perspective to see if Instagram stories are conducive with UX guidelines. The next experiment included participants from various age groups and looked at the users experience with social interaction. Then lastly, they looked at both studies to see the impact of these Instagram stories in social interactions.
Their findings concluded that “Instagrams ephemerality proposal” violated guideline of UX and socialbility. This negatively effects the fluidity of social interactions as a “collaborative system”.
I understand the frustrations with Instagram’s interface. As other classmates have stated, I think it would be much more helpful if we were able to search who was watching our stories. I also think it tedious to always have to tag someone in your story or else they cannot repost what you posted of them. These are small things, however I think they contribute to the bigger picture of disrupted sociability on Instagram.
I find this study interesting because of its specificity. Before taking this class, I thought about the impact of technology in big-picture terms. I never would have thought that it would be worthwhile to conduct multiple studies on Instagram stories alone. That being said, I hear what you’re saying about how certain limitations of stories disrupt sociability and I’m interested to learn about the impact of these findings.