Adam Mosseri, the company’s chief, provided a look at three home screen layout options that are currently in testing. All the new looks provide separate tabs for Shops and Reels. The first layout placed Home, Reels, Add, Shops, and Profile tabs in the bottom navigation pane. Explore, Notifications, and Messages will be relocated to the top-right corners. Second places Home, Explore, Reels, Shops, and Profile down below and Notifications and Messages top-right, with Add top-left. Finally, the third layout would put more tabs at the bottom (Home, Explore, Reels, Shops, Notification, and Profile) with Messages and Add moved top-right.
— Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) September 9, 2020 Instagram clearly wants its new Reels tool to be more front and center of the UI experience. Launched a month ago, Reels is the company’s answer to TikTok. It is a short video tool for users on the app.
Tough Few Months
Instagram has needed to weather some problems in recent months. Back in June, Microsoft and other major companies pulled advertising from Facebook in response to the company’s poor handling of racial tensions following the murder of Floyd George. Brands like Coca-Cola, Starbucks, and Ford Motor Company have all their ads on the platform. Instagram felt the impact as part of Facebook’s group of services. Last month, the app became a focus of bad actors conducting phishing attacks. The campaigns were interesting because they went directly through Instagram. Phishing attacks are typically associated with email, and that’s how previous campaigns on Instagram have unfolded. However, the latest attack method involves directly messaging people on their IG account. This is arguably more effective because users would be more willing to blindly believe a seemingly official IG message on the platform itself. TikTok´s surge resembles somehow that one of Instagram, Facebook and Twitter before. You can even buy TikTok likes to get ahead on the competitive TikTok platform.
