X seems to be near launching a brand new button alongside the underside operate bar of the app, with its devoted, immersive video feed to be immediately accessible in a single faucet.
As you possibly can see on this instance, shared by app researcher @p4mui, the underside operate bar on X is ready to get a revamp, with a brand new icon for Grok, its AI chatbot, and a fast hyperlink to its full-screen video feed.
Which, provided that X retains touting itself as a “video first platform”, is smart. Although it’s nonetheless not “video first”, in that it gained’t open to that feed.
Regardless, the replace would put extra emphasis on video content material, and as X continues to construct out its slate of authentic video programming, that’s slowly changing into a extra crucial focus for its enterprise planning, with regard to viewers retention and advert placement.
Although, then once more, X has really been experimenting with this for a while, with an preliminary prototype of an up to date decrease operate bar noticed in testing in January final 12 months.
As you possibly can see, at that stage, there was no Grok button, so it stored the decrease operate choices to solely 5 icons. Now, X has expanded that to 6, with this new iteration set to interchange the “Teams” tab with the video button as an alternative.
Which can also be attention-grabbing from a UI perspective.
Earlier Twitter administration have been tremendous hesitant so as to add too many operate buttons to this decrease panel, for concern of cluttering the person expertise. Certainly, again in 2015, when Twitter launched “Moments”, there was a lot inner debate about whether or not they need to embody a Moments tab inside this panel.
They did, finally, add a lightning bolt icon for Moments, however they eliminated it a 12 months later, changing it with the “Discover” button as an alternative. It caught with solely 5 tabs from then on, however X has already added one other, which can or might not influence person engagement.
However as famous, if X actually needs to make video the main focus, it wants to search out methods to do precisely that.
You may already faucet into X’s full-screen video feed by increasing any video in-stream, then swiping as much as go to the subsequent video clip, however that’s not overly intuitive. And with video consumption rising (X says that video views within the app elevated 40% year-over-year), it is smart for X to allow a extra direct video viewing choice.
If it really will get launched.
Possibly, this time round, X will really launch this new tab, although it may also be an X Premium unique, that means that hardly anybody will get to make use of it.
Both method, it’s one other indicator of X’s deal with video, which ought to be factored into your X content material planning.
