Justin Racine, director of marketing and e-commerce, Geriatric Medical

Two days after Christmas, Instagram decided to change what may be the largest and most-used feature of its app, the finger-scroll. If you aren’t familiar with Instagram, the feature essentially allows users to use their finger to scroll through all the recent posts.

Instagram and its app team decided to change this feature to something new. Now, instead of scrolling, you would “tap” the picture and it would show you the next recent photo or piece of content. But everyone seemed to hate the change. The backlash was monumental, so much so that it caused Instagram to roll the feature back, then lose credibility with users by attempting to cover it up by blaming the feature on a “bug,” which would have been believable if they didn’t publish the below screen that told users exactly how to use the new feature.

This recent blunder by Instagram, however, is an important learning opportunity for all of us in the e-commerce space who are responsible for the user experience and interfaces of our websites.

First, key features of websites or apps should never be launched without fully testing and vetting them with customers. At Geriatric Medical, we develop most of our site features to address challenges or problems that are customers are having. In addition, we work very closely with our team to build enhancements that will complement the key features and ordering sections of our site. The “Instagram Tap” feature would be similar to us inverting the scroll feature on our ordering list pages, it just wouldn’t make any logical sense.

Try to please all site users, not just a segment

It’s also important to realize that users are very, very familiar and used to the experiences that they receive on a specific platform. If you are launching a new e-commerce platform, you sometimes will be allowed some flexibility with customers as they are expecting a new site, but if you are looking to make changes to existing user experience or interface, you better be sure to do your research, have a focus group to test, and be sure that the new features will be beneficial to all site users, not just a specific segment.

I’ve always been fond of the saying “If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.” In this case, nothing was breaking with the Instagram scroll feature, but maybe they just felt that it was time to change it? Maybe employees of Instagram are just building new features for job justification? I can’t tell you the reason as to what made them make this change. What I can tell you, is that this should be a reminder to us all that, in theory, making changes and enhancements to our commerce solutions sounds great on paper, but so much more has to go into the strategy, testing and implementation of new experiences and interfaces. We also should use this as a reminder that when launching a new feature that doesn’t work, trying to backtrack and say the feature was a ‘bug’ when you already released an image of how to use the new feature, just makes it look worse.

So, as we enter 2019, let’s thank Instagram for this recent reminder that:

1. Always use focus groups to test and build new experiences and interfaces
2. If it isn’t broke, you don’t necessarily have to “fix it”
3. The voice of the customer is EVERYTHING

Justin Racine is director of marketing and e-commerce at Geriatric Medical, a distributor of medical supplies. Follow him on Twitter @JustinPRacine.