Instagram

A grid-first profile colliding with a full-screen, recommendation-driven feed.

Instagram's original contract was the profile grid: a tidy, scannable archive where the unit was the square photo. That logic still governs the profile, but the home feed has drifted somewhere else entirely. What you scroll now is mostly Reels and suggested accounts, ranked by predicted watch time rather than who you follow. The seams show. Stories sit in a top rail with their own tap-to-advance grammar, the feed below uses vertical swipe, and Reels hijacks the whole screen with a third interaction model. Three navigation logics stacked in one app. The double-tap-to-like gesture remains genuinely good muscle memory. But the constant nudging toward content you didn't ask for is the clearest example of a feed optimized against its own follow graph.

Mobile

Interaction Design

Product Insights