Snapchat is redesigning its app to separate media and social communications, making it easier to use and understand. CEO Evan Spiegel wrote an opinion piece for Axios Wednesday morning, saying that the separation takes "an important step forward towards strengthening our relationships with our friends and our relationships with the media."
Why it matters: Snapchat's last earnings showed slowed percentage of user growth for the fourth consecutive quarter. The company hopes a redesign will attract new users and engage current ones that may feel less inspired to post on Facebook and Instagram — rival platforms that rely on content recommendations from friends instead of algorithms and human curation tailored to individuals.
The redesign will begin to roll out to a small percentage of users later this week and will be available to all users on iOS and and Android globally in coming weeks. According to a Snap spokesperson, the entire redesign was done in-house.
The major design changes are centered around the separation of a "Discover" page on the right — which displays vetted publisher stories, stories from around the world, or stories from influencers or people you chose to follow that you don't know personally — and a "Friends" page on the left that features updates from your close friends and family. At the center is the "Send-to" homepage, or a navigation that starts with using its camera.
Newer features, like Maps and Bitmojis, will be more easily accessible within more places on the app.
Business and advertising products and operations will remain the same for the most part.
Snapchat will use algorithmic content recommendations, like Netflix, to help users discover new content, instead of relying on friends or large networks to elevate it to users through engagement (likes, comments, etc.) The content that users chose to follow will sit on top of the algorithmically-recommended content (curated stories, publisher stories and influencer stories/snaps).
You can expect dozens of signals to affect the recommendations to your Friends and Discover pages, most of which will be based on content or people you've already engaged with, according to a Snap spokesperson. Separating the signals by page means that the experience will be much more customizable.
Users will also now have a tool to easily hide anything they see in Discover that they don't like, which will help inform the tailored content.
Human curation and moderation of content is something the company is emphasizing heavily with this redesign. Unlike Facebook, which told Axios earlier this year that it's a technology company that doesn't hire journalists to moderate content, Snapchat says it will have a team of content programmers coming from editorial backgrounds to ensure "that each user sees a diverse mix of content formats, and be able to promote interesting or editorially important content to users."
What's changed and how to use new Snapchat?
Change: Snapchat is getting rid of the Stories Page entirely.
How this works: While the app will still open into the camera — which is still the center of the action to encourage users to create something — all private messages and user stories will now exist together on a “Friends” screen when you swipe right off the camera. Discover content, which includes shows, Publisher Stories and popular user Stories, are located at the other side of the camera when you swipe left.
Why this matters: Snap is trying to explicitly differentiate between your personal content and communications (friends) and professional media content (Discover), so it’s separating them entirely. Previously, Stories and some professional content existed together on the now-defunct Stories page.
It’ll be interesting to see if the move helps or hurts publishers. The good news is that publishers’ content is now one swipe closer to Snapchat’s home screen, which means it should be easier to find. The (potentially) bad news is that it’s unclear how much of that publisher content users watched because it was interspersed with posts from their friends. It’s possible users could go to the screen full of content from friends and just ignore the Discover page altogether.
Change: Snap is bringing back auto-advance on user Stories. Kinda.
How this works: When you watch a friend’s Story, it will now ask you if you want to watch the next story in the queue. With a tap, the next story will play. Snap used to jump users from one story to the next automatically, but abruptly changed that last October. Now, it’s back.
Why this matters: Auto-playing one story to the next, even if it does require a one-tap approval, should theoretically increase the number of Stories people watch. Think of it like Netflix: When the next episode is queued up for you to automatically watch as soon as you finish the previous one, it keeps you watching longer.
Change: Snapchat is using more algorithms to personalize what you see.
How this works: While this is invisible to most users, much of what you see on Snapchat will now be determined by an algorithm. And now a new algorithm is here to determine which friends show up on the top of your Friends page. “Your Friends will be listed in the order that you want to talk to them,” the company wrote on its blog.
Snap will also use a new algorithm to show you stuff in your Discover feed. While that content has always been personalized, Snap claims these new algorithms are significantly better than what it used before. For now, we’ll have to take their word for it, because — much like Facebook’s algorithm that dictates what you see in News Feed — Snapchat’s new algorithm is mostly a mystery. It appears as though Snap will rely on users’ feedback to determine what they like and what they don’t like.
Did you click on a post and share it to a friend? Or did you hide it from your feed? Those actions should help dictate what you see next and — just as important — what you don’t.
Why this matters: If Snap can better figure out what you want to see, it’s reasonable to believe you’ll spend more time using the app. A better algorithm means more time spent, more ads from Snapchat and, thus, more revenue.
Change: Snap is putting more and varied content inside Discover.
How this works: In addition to the traditional publisher content you find inside Discover, such as mini-shows or the magazine-like Publisher Stories, Snap will now put popular events inside Discover that you can find from the company’s maps product. It’s also going to put popular Stories inside Discover, including those that aren’t from a famous celebrity. Any public Story that reaches a certain viewership threshold could appear in Discover after a manual review from a Snap employee.
It’s unclear what that threshold is, since the company is not giving details on that, but it should theoretically help popular creators with big audiences get their work in front of more users. That’s because you could see a Story on the Discover page from a user you don’t follow, which means you might be exposed to users you didn’t know existed.
Why this matters: More content in Discover means more things for you to spend time watching. Plus, given Snapchat’s new algorithm, the more content the company has to work with, the more tailored it can be for each user. It could also be bad news for publishers, because more content inside Discover means more competition for time and attention.
One thing that’s not changing is Snapchat’s ads. Ads will still run in the same places they’ve always run, with the exception of the company’s new Promoted Stories ad, which just came out last week. That ad currently exists on the Stories page, but because the Stories page is disappearing, that ad will now appear on the Discover page.
The new version of the app will start rolling out to a small group of Snapchat users this week, and will reach all of Snap’s users worldwide in the coming weeks, the company said.
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