Instagram announces mid-feed Preview Tiles for stories

Despite being a blatant copy of Snapchat Stories, the Instagram Stories are becoming popular by the day. To make it more appealing to the users, the company announced that it has redesigned its mid-feed re-engagement box for Stories to show preview tiles of people’s slideshows that are twice as big as the Stories bar atop the feed. The new feature was discovered by Chris Messina.

That's an interesting new design for @instagram stories... pic.twitter.com/OSRmGi4hnT

— 🦇 Chris Messina 🦇 (@chrismessina) October 28, 2017

Instagram also confirmed the new feature to TechCrunch in a statement that reads, “We recently updated the design of the stories bar that you see while scrolling through the feed. This update makes it easier to preview the stories from the people and accounts you care about.”

While before, Stories were limited to a bar along the top of the app, Instagram is now placing much larger “preview tiles” of Stories in a user’s main feed. You’ll see the new tiles while scrolling throughout the feed, under a “Recent Stories” heading. You’ll see three rather large tiles next one another, with each one offering a quick preview of another user’s story and the option to tap to view the whole story.

Prior to this, users had no way of knowing what kind of content is being shown inside of an Instagram Story until they actually click it. This new feature will actually help in saving the time of the user. In addition to making Stories more prominent, Instagram is also testing a new Stop Motion camera tool, as discovered by The Verge. The Stop Motion tool is designed to let users take a series of photos which Instagram then stitches together into a GIF.