Instagram's Mike Krieger on apps: are you getting the design right or do you have the right design?
App and mobile design has come a long way in the past few years, with many popular services shifting their focus more towards to improving the way their apps look.
Context & Ripple Effects
Krieger's design talk caps an eighteen-month run in which Instagram moved from promising upstart to scale player: back in May 2011 GigaOm was still asking whether it could become the mobile social hub, and by September 2012 comScore data had it passing Twitter in daily mobile users among U.S. smartphone owners. Along the way it shipped the 3.0 update with infinite scrolling and the location-based Photo Map, then extended the brand off-device with web profiles in early November 2012.
Against that backdrop, the interview's core question — whether apps iterate toward getting the design right or start with the right design — reads as Instagram explaining its own method at the moment its visual choices carry industry-wide weight. The story travelled widely the same week, picked up by both TechCrunch and GigaOM, and lands amid a confirmed broader shift of popular services putting more effort into how their apps look.
First-order effects
- Instagram's design decisions now set a reference point for rivals: with comScore showing it ahead of Twitter in daily U.S. mobile usage as of September 2012, how Krieger's team iterates the app is what competing photo services get measured against.
- Coming weeks after the November 2012 web-profile rollout, the interview frames design as the through-line connecting Instagram's app, its Photo Map feature, and its new web presence into one coherent identity.
Second-order effects
- Photo-sharing competitors face pressure to respond with design-led revamps rather than feature-list one-upmanship, since Instagram's trajectory argues that polish and interaction quality drive daily engagement.
- As more popular services shift resources toward app aesthetics per the trend Krieger speaks to, experienced mobile designers become a scarcer, more contested hire across the industry.
Third-order effects
- If design keeps displacing raw features as the differentiator in mobile social apps, the advantage accrues to teams that can sustain iterative design at scale — and to the platforms and tooling that shape what good mobile design is even possible.
- Krieger's distinction between 'getting the design right' and 'having the right design' points toward design process itself becoming an evaluation lens for products and the companies behind them, though whether that holds beyond photo sharing is genuinely open.
The trend: Early-2010s mobile app competition is shifting from feature checklists to design craft, with Instagram's user-scale growth making its design choices the industry's de facto benchmark.