Following Lists
Problem
Instagram is a hub for so many communities, from your close friends, to celebrities, to design inspiration. But currently, your feed brings in all your communities into one place with no flow or logic to it. This makes it hard when I want to browse for something specific or if there are current communities I do not care about at the moment. The need for a more organized and curated feed is so necessary that there are some users who create new accounts just to keep their communities separated.
Solution
Giving users the ability to create more specialized lists is an easy way to fix this problem. Instagram already has something similar to this called the "Favorites" section. Accessing Favorites shows only the accounts that have been added to your Favorites. My solution builds off of this feature, giving more control in creating different lists.
Audience
All Instagram users
Impact and Level of Effort
Business Impact: Instagram used to be a place where people only followed their close friends and users posted silly pictures. Times have evolved since then and there are a wide variety of users and content creators thriving on Instagram. This make it a great place for people to follow creators of different interests all in one app. However, it's extremely hard if a user is ever trying to look for something specific. Especially with the ever-so reactive algorithm, Instagram only suggests what it thinks you are interested at the time. Building out a Following Lists feature allows more control for both users and Instagram to show and suggest content. This instantly helps push suggested content to be more related to what the user currently wants to see. This also removes frustration from users when they don't want to see content from a certain interests (ie: sometime I just want to see what my friends have posted recently, but a lot of companies or celebrity accounts get in the way on the feed).
Technical Effort: This design takes advantage of features that already exist: the Favorites feature as well as the Bookmark feature. It has the same visual language as those features, so the user flow should not be hard to implement. This would be the easiest way to implement this feature. In an ideal world, this feature would not be so hidden (under the Instagram logo that doesn't even look clickable) and could be part of the user's regular scrolling habits. However, this would rework the structure of Instagram greatly and would be a much bigger change. As a small nice-to-have feature for now, the current location of this implementation works.