What do you see?

Firstly, since its inception in 2010, all the way until the end of 2016, Instagram has always had an icon of a camera sitting in the middle of the navbar.

Sure, it’s undergone some cosmetic changes, but it’s always been a camera. In fact, Instagram’s logo (itself with a range of evolutions over the years) is an unmistakable iconic Instagram camera. Anyone who sees it and is even a little familiar with popular consumer apps will arguably likely associate that icon to Instagram.

In fact, Instagram so valued the act of taking pictures and sharing them with the community that it made it the heart of the whole app experience. The camera icon is always in the middle of the navbar and it’s almost always had some aesthetic quality to it that draws the user’s attention.

In 2010 and 2011, it was the elongated height that set the Photo/Share icon apart from the other actions in the navbar.

From 2012 to 2015, the height was brought back in line with the rest of the navbar but given a bright blue highlight to contrast it against the other actions.

2016 marked the first redesign where Instagram decided to go away with all the extra aesthetics and went with a no-fuss, minimalist, almost monochrome design. It still kept the camera icon but it was no longer proudly drawing special attention to itself.

SIDE NOTE: this may have something to do with the fact that Instagram has come to expect people are now very familiar with how to share photos with the community and that they don’t need that same level of hand-held guidance to do so. This is fair, if bordering on presumptuous on the mental models of most people. While Instagram may boast that it has somewhere in the vicinity of 600 million active users, this means that around 6.4 billion people in the world are NOT using Instagram. Making assumptions about how that many people will interpret and use the app is dangerous for long-term growth.

And then, without much warning or backlash, sometime in late 2016, Instagram decided to pull the rug out from its iconic camera and replace it with … this:

A plus sign.

While a camera had always represented pictures and the act of sharing, the new icon is admittedly pretty bland. It’s devoid of character and emotion (the earlier camera icons arguably instilled some sense of nostalgia of an older time) and has been reduced to the cold task of … addition? What exactly does a plus mean in an Instagram context anyway?

And while it felt like this was a simple, casual replacement, my gut-feeling is that this isn’t a small deal.

In fact, it may actually be the biggest deal in Instagram’s history.

To talk a little more about this, I need to refer to the popular notion of the UX iceberg.