Instagram Tries Out New Ways to Navigate Through Story Feed

The popular facebook owned photo sharing app Instagram has found a new way to test its users’ stories feed in order to help users find stories, which are more relevant to them.

Reverse engineering expert Jane Manchun Wong posted this example on a leading tech magazine late last week. This test would enable users to side the main stories frame down to reveal the stories tray at the top of the screen, then switch through to each. Claimed she.

Wong also noted that Instagram has tested another variation of the same in the past – which prompted Instagram chief Adam Mosseri to weigh in, confirming that they are in fact testing new options to help people navigate through their Stories stream.

The option according to Mosseri could add a different flow to stories and as a result make them easier to run through. The biggest impact, however, is that Instagram is moving a step further at simplifying the usage of its app.

Over the past few years, Facebook has repeatedly noted that Stories are on track to overtake the News Feed as the primary surface for social media engagement.

This chart is from 2018, and back then it already seemed that Stories would soon dominate social engagement.

A key point to note is that despite the increase in usage of stories, the news fees still remains the dominant presentation more in facebook’s apps, with the main feed taking up a majority of screen space on both facebook and Instagram.

Perhaps in future Instagram would open up a full screen Stories view, where you could swing through the latest and past updates, we don’t know yet. Instagram might be considering given the fact that popular apps such as Snapchat and TikTok are catching up on its lead at a brisk pace.

The implementation would for sure have its significant implications as to how people use the app, and would veer further from its original photography focus.

Who knows, perhaps this experiment would prove to pay dividends in the long run. If Instagram does go ahead with the presentation option more people would simply be more engaged with Stories that, eventually, could lead to it discovering that users are spending more time within this stream than they are in the main feed. At some point, given the usage trends, Stories may outweigh the main feed leaving Stories to logically take over as the primary function.

The trends suggest that this will happen anyway, and this experiment could be a step along that path.

As such, while it might seem like a minor update now, and a minor debate as to how you view Stories at present, it could become more significant in the near future.