Ask yourself this before you step into User Profiling.

When Instagram was being built, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger were learning to code in their spare time.

Photo by Ben Sweet on Unsplash

As a UI/UX designer, you’ll come across similar apps, where you’ll be building user profiles.

The first product they came up with was called Burbn. If you haven’t heard of it, it was the tip of the huge Instagram iceberg.

The idea was that the app-enabled users to share their location using photographs of the place. When they launched, they had a few users, and the number of people who were using it might be in thousands. After a while, the growth wasn’t massive. It stagnated.

So at a point, they had a look at what people exactly we using this Burbn app for. They found out that a lot of people were using it as a photo-sharing application. Just to share an image that they took at a particular location. Location photosharing wasn’t particularly important, they wanted to show off their photographs.

The thing that you think that your app might be about, might not be the thing users value.

So you have to know who your users are and what they want to do using your app. This is done by profiling your users.

User Profiling