Instagram pushes a disaster redesign; surprised?

Hours ago Instagram mass pushed a trial for a feed redesign, it was incredibly ugly.

The usual way Instagram users navigate their feed is to scroll/swipe down and up (vertically). This new design was to tap left to right. Sounds bad, is bad and judging by the masses, was bad.

Reddit user cuepinto posted the above screen capture of the new design in one of the many r/instagram posts about the release. Showing the horizontal feed type.

Instagram users were quick to hit up social media and display their displeasure and question why Instagram had done a change. After copping a pasting all over the internet Instagram said it was a bug

It may well have been a bug with the new design likely to have been aimed at being applied to a small percentage of users, mistakes happen with percentages easily. The fact that instructions were displayed makes this more believable.

What doesn’t bode well about the whole situation is the new design overall. Taping left to right to navigate your Instagram feed allows for more ads and interaction with the ads. These interactions are almost always accidental and will be more accidental with the new Instagram UI.

This thread among many on r/instagram shows the pure displeasure and surprise that Instagram did in fact just put out a horrible redesign. Dedicated Reddit subs don’t always have fanboys but most of the users are devoted to the cause, when the sub is full of dislike to this change somethings up Instagram.

Snapchat itself went through the same trouble, changing design and UI to suit more ad engagement when in reality the ad engagement is accidental. Its something furious to users, yet sadly there isn’t a real threat to the Instagrams and Snapchats.

VSCO focuses more on art and actually photography rather than memes, likes and comments but sadly I hope Instagram users don’t jump ship and ruin this platform. It is already filled with gifs and tweet screenshots.

I havent been on Instagram in years, I don’t miss it. More than happy to not be a part of the FaceBook data harvester. You can only hope that greed and dodgy tactics gets what it deserves for Instagram.