Snapchat is testing a redesign with a navigation bar, a top news section, and a more accessible Snap Map, three years after its last, widely panned redesign
A new home for the Snap Map and its original shows — plus a new test of news briefs — Snap is working on two significant tests …
Context & Ripple Effects
Snap has been here before: the 2018 redesign that mixed friends' Stories with celebrity Discover content was so poorly received that Snap spent months unwinding pieces of it, from a reverse-chronological Stories feed in tabs to a broader rollout that put Snaps and Chats back in chronological order. The instinct to give editorial content more prominence also runs deep, dating to the 2015 design change that pushed Discover toward the front of the app.
This test revives both threads at once — a persistent navigation bar, a top news section, and a more accessible Snap Map — and it lands just months before Snap shipped a similar structure for real: an action bar with a Happening Now banner curating news stories. The through-line is Snap repeatedly probing how much media surface its messaging-first user base will tolerate.
First-order effects
- Snap's test cohort gets a home-screen reorganization that elevates news briefs and Snap Map access, while Discover publishers gain a potential top-of-app placement for their content.
- The design directly answers the 2018 backlash by separating navigation from the friends feed rather than blending Stories with Discover content, the exact conflation users revolted against.
Second-order effects
- If the news section graduates to the Happening Now banner as the June rollout suggests, publishers and advertisers shift from bidding for Discover real estate to competing for curated-banner placement, concentrating distribution power with Snap's editors.
- A more prominent Snap Map turns a feature many users had buried into a daily surface, raising the stakes for the location-based content and partnerships built on it.
Third-order effects
- Snap's cycle of bold redesign, backlash, and partial rollback points to a structural identity question: whether it settles as a friend-to-friend messenger with media bolted on, or keeps drifting toward a curated content platform where navigation bars and news banners are the compromise shape.
- Each iteration also normalizes algorithmic and editorial curation over strict chronology, the same tension that drove the 2017 search-and-navigation update and every redesign since.
The trend: Snapchat's redesign history shows a platform oscillating between friend-first messaging and an editorially curated media destination, with each test probing how much news surface its core users will accept.