X Tests Dedicated Video Tab in Lower Function Bar

X appears to be near launching a brand new button alongside the underside perform bar of the app, with its devoted, immersive video feed to be instantly accessible in a single faucet.

As you’ll be able to see on this instance, shared by app researcher @p4mui, the underside perform 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, on condition 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 unique video programming, that’s slowly turning into a extra important focus for its enterprise planning, with regard to viewers retention and advert placement.

Although, then once more, X has truly been experimenting with this for a while, with an preliminary prototype of an up to date decrease perform bar noticed in testing in January final yr.

As you’ll be able to see, at that stage, there was no Grok button, so it saved the decrease perform choices to solely 5 icons. Now, X has expanded that to 6, with this new iteration set to exchange the “Teams” tab with the video button as a substitute.

Which can be fascinating from a UI perspective.

Earlier Twitter administration have been tremendous hesitant so as to add too many perform buttons to this decrease panel, for worry of cluttering the consumer expertise. Certainly, again in 2015, when Twitter launched “Moments”, there was a lot inside debate about whether or not they need to embody a Moments tab inside this panel.

They did, ultimately, add a lightning bolt icon for Moments, however they eliminated it a yr later, changing it with the “Discover” button as a substitute. It caught with solely 5 tabs from then on, however X has already added one other, which can or might not influence consumer engagement.

However as famous, if X actually needs to make video the main target, it wants to seek 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 following 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 possibility.

If it truly will get launched.

Possibly, this time round, X will truly launch this new tab, although it may additionally be an X Premium unique, which means that hardly anybody will get to make use of it.

Both method, it’s one other indicator of X’s concentrate on video, which must be factored into your X content material planning.