These eye-tracking heatmaps reveal why Instagram's new icon could actually be a huge improvement

This happened when Instagram changed its app icon at the start of May. The flatter, more abstract design was described as possibly "one of the biggest design fails of the year," by Adweek.

However, the industry trade title was wrong, according to new analysis from Dragonfly - a design analysis app created by Black Swan and researchers from Queen Mary University, London.

The new logo is actually 10% more engaging to the human eye than its predecessor, according to the app.

Dragonfly uses a computational model to process the visual characteristics of what someone is looking at (orientation, contrast, texture, luminance) to assign a stimulus attention score to every pixel, demonstrating its attractiveness. The resulting graphics are heatmaps that display what grabs human attention in the first three seconds of interaction.

Business Insider asked Dragonfly to analyze the old and new logos of ten major brands, giving each a saliency score out of 100. Below are the results: