Instagram’s Story feature has been one of the platform’s more successful features since it was launched, despite the fact that it does seem to be a pretty blatant copy of Snapchat’s own feature. That being said, Instagram has recently pushed out an update that makes some changes/improvements to it.
This comes in the form of mid-feed preview tiles for Stories which was discovered over the weekend by Chris Messina. If you have been using Instagram then you know that sometimes when you scroll through your feed, you might be reminded to check out Instagram Stories of people you follow that you haven’t seen yet. However as you can see in the screenshot above, the mid-feed preview tiles means that you can get a sneak peek as to what the story might be about.
That’s an interesting new design for @instagram stories… pic.twitter.com/OSRmGi4hnT
— Chris Messina (@chrismessina) October 28, 2017
Based on that and depending on your interests, you can choose whether or not you want to watch it. Prior to this, users had no way of knowing what kind of content is being show inside of an Instagram Story until they actually click it. We suppose having a preview does prevent us from wasting time on clicking, and in some cases avoid awkward moments when an Instagram Story might not be safe for work, or if music is going to suddenly start blasting out of your phone.
Instagram has 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 feed. This update makes it easier to preview the stories from the people and accounts you care about.”