Stories, Reels, Fleets and the importance of user-centered design process
Twitter yesterday just launched fleets — a similar version of stories that lets users share short/long-form video as well as tweets which disappear after a certain period of time. In terms of why this product feature was launched, Senior Design Director Joshua Harris and PM Sam Haveson noted that it was to enable people to be more willing to share their thoughts and tweets since they disappear after a day. That makes sense, the idea of taking away likes and retweets has been such a hot topic discussion recently with Instagram also experimenting with removing away likes on posts.
However, under the hood, it’s essentially an Instagram Stories clone which is also a Snapchat clone! Virtually every platform has rolled out their version of stories, which begs the question — who really asked for this feature? Would it be actually used by users? In their testing, Joshua and Sam noted that they saw more users engage and participate in conversations. It's yet to be seen if Twitter users will use the feature or if it will turn into a “ghost town” found on Facebook stories. LinkedIn even launched its own version as well — which was particularly baffling as a professional networking site. Curiosity makes me wonder what the process was that led to the rollout of “stores” on many of these platforms. It’s amazing to see the social media movement of stories that was originally kicked off by Snapchat but how useful they are on these other platforms remains to be a hit and miss.
Instagrams most recent redesign also brought users and content creators immense frustration. The creation was pushed to the top right of the home feed with the addition of reels and shop on the bottom navigation. From the UX perspective, it conveys to me that they are heavily prioritizing shopping and reels over content creation. Instagram’s origins are grounded in content creation not short-form videos like TikTok or even shopping. Was the process that landed to this reorganization truly user-centered? Was there user research to back up the redesign? Or was there internal pressure to force users to use reels and view products to shopping on the platform? If public sentiment is any indication of this redesign, it was clear that users were frustrated. It’s interesting to also note that most reels on IG are reposted TikToks which brings into question the broader success of this product feature launch.
These recent feature rollouts truly demonstrate the importance of a user-centered design process. It seems these recent changes are solving problems that really do not exist — or perhaps they don’t directly address the specific problem they are trying to solve. For these social media giants, features are continually being cloned, developed, and justified within the context of a particular platform. Does the success of Snapchat and IG stories translate to LinkedIn/Twitter/Youtube?
