Ever open up Snapchat and find yourself annoyed that photos and videos from your friends are mixed in with content from publishers? Snapchat on Wednesday announced a major redesign that will ease your irritation.
"Today we're separating the 'social' from the 'media' and reorganizing Snapchat around your relationships to make it more personal," Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said in a video announcing the redesign.
Following the redesign, Snapchat opens to the camera for easy content creation as usual. From there, just swipe left to see what your friends are up to, or swipe right to access the Discover section, which includes content from publishers, creators, and the Snapchat community and is populated based on your interests.
"While blurring the lines between professional content creators and your friends has been an interesting Internet experiment, it has also produced some strange side-effects (like fake news) and made us feel like we have to perform for our friends rather than just express ourselves," the Snap team wrote in a blog post. The redesigned app aims to change that.
The new friends page shows your contacts "based on the way you communicate with them," the Snap team explained.
"You can think of it as a more sophisticated Best Friends algorithm that makes it easier to find the friends you want to talk to, when you want to talk to them," Snap wrote. "It might take a little while for the Friends page to learn the best way to display your Friends, but the results are worth it!"
Stories on the Discover page are "personalized algorithmically," though Snap's human curator's "review and approve everything that gets promoted on the page," the company wrote. "We believe that this balance of human review and machine personalization provides the best content experience on mobile."
Spiegel earlier this month hinted that a big redesign was on the way.
"One thing that we have heard over the years is that Snapchat is difficult to understand or hard to use, and our team has been working on responding to this feedback," the CEO said earlier this month. "As a result, we are currently redesigning our application to make it easier to use.
Meanwhile, Snapchat also recently rolled out a new feature that can recognize what's in your image, and offer up relevant graphics. So, if you're snapping a photo of your pooch, Snapchat might unlock a pet-themed filter that says "it's a pawty!"