Instagram Boomerang

Single-tap Multicapture

I’d like to share a project I began at Instagram while serving on the Camera Team which lead to an eventual feature called Multicapture. I felt the IG Stories camera could better accommodate people’s natural behavior (we had data to support this), and that revisiting the Boomerang format would be a good way to test the camera capture flow. 

People’s behavior was less linear than the existing UX assumed. Although, many people retake multiple photos/videos before posting to Stories, the existing flow was one directional. When the shutter button was pressed the capture session ended and the Edit screen appeared. Going back to take another shot meant losing the shot you already took. Creating a single Story was easy, but posting multiple stories meant the entire capture and share flow must be completed multiple times.

We revised the capture flow to make video capture more fluid and to support multiple captures. In the revised flow any or all of the Boomerangs in a single capture session can be easily edited and shared. Additional shots can be taken at anytime without losing previous work.

Next, I built a prototype to demonstrate Boomerang creation with a single tap of the shutter button. Barring additional AI or computer vision, one-tap capture was the simplest camera UI possible.

Using Apple’s Live Photos API, frames before and after the shutter button press are formatted into a video file. A small preview image was displayed while the video file was being processed asynchronously. Displaying the most recent shot in a square format with a minimal processing indicator provided greater detail in limited space.

The capture preview needed to have a small footprint and be flexible enough to share space with other UI elements, but be large enough to meaningfully represent the Boomerang.

The Multicapture format was launched later. Although the format was for photos only, many of the principles we explored carried through.