Yahoo Finance Facebook redesigns 'confusing' Messenger app
Facebook has redesigned its Messenger app to prioritise Stories as it vies with Snapchat for control of the "ephemeral messaging" market.
Stan Chudnovsky, Messenger's head of product, said the app had become too complicated and needed to be slimmed down in order to prevent important features being buried.
The revamp will give greater prominence to Stories, which allows users to send vanishing photos and videos and which Facebook has recently begun to monetise with adverts.
It will also make it easier for users to access games and e-commerce chatbots, which are central to Facebook's plan to make Messenger a hub for online shopping and customer service.
"You know how the human brain works: when we give people too many options then people don't do anything," Mr Chudnovsky told the Telegraph. "There were a bunch of experiments [showing that] when you give people a choice of three they have no problem making it. But if you're giving people a choice of 20, they are confused and end up choosing nothing.
"That was done with jams and soaps and consumer goods, but interfaces on the internet are not necessarily very different. When you have all these options you forget what you even came there for."
Facebook has invested heavily in Stories, placing it at the top of users' news feeds and prompting Instagram users to add their Instagram stories to their Facebook ones. That led its daily users double from 150 million in May to 300 million last month, driven largely by users in central America, south-east Asia and the Middle East.
The company needs new messaging formats and new users in the developing world to compensate for slowing growth in its main product, as well as to head off rivals such as Snapchat, whose daily users dropped from 191 million to 188 million at the end of June.
Previously Messenger had nine separate tabs, with Stories only appearing in one. The new version will condense these to three tabs, two of which will show Stories at the top, in one case more than twice as large as before.
"[Messenger is] very fast growing, and we don't want to break that growth at a moment when people are not fully accustomed to it," Mr Chudnovsky said. "We don't want to hide it from them, because they are just starting to use it more and more but it's a behaviour that's not ingrained fully - so you don't want to be constantly putting it into another tab."
The app currently shows adverts in between conversations in user's inboxes, and increasingly inserts them between stories, but Mr Chudnovsky pledged they will "never" appear inside actual conversations.
