This whole recent update to Snapchat has been horrible in almost every way. Haven't heard a single good thing from the people I know who use it. My question is how does an update that is almost universally hated by the user base get through to production? Does Snapchat not have any user feedback in their design or is it simply "How can we make more money"?
Seems to me Snapchat forgot the most important thing about a products profitability: the customers.
Some years ago Hootsuite changed the way a feature called "social picker" worked. It was a major change, and many power users (people managing multiple accounts or brand accounts) pointed out that it made their work a lot harder and more prone to error. Hootsuite's response: blaming users' "fear of change" for the reaction (1).
Later someone from the company apologized, and said that "extensive user testing" had been done, but they clearly missed an important segment of the market.
Thing is, some segment of users will always go nuts whenever you change anything. If you're in charge of product development it's hard to take any particular moment of outrage too seriously.
If you are in product development, the lesson is that any change has a cost and impact to your users, so you need to make sure that the benefits outweigh the cost and plan for resistance.
That's entirely different from "they will complain no mater what you do so you should ignore them".
Is there any indication that hadn't happened here? Is Snap
really that stupid? Did they not test this at all? If so, that's the big story.
Unspecified numbers of users complaining isn't a terribly sufficient story. I recall lots of facebook "boycotts" over the years ago over various UI changes, totally forgotten after a day or two. I suspect they actually a/b tested each change in small markets or test audiences and found usage increased after people got used to it. If Snap isn't doing that then that should be big news.
That's a non-sequitur if I've ever seen one. A non-negligible portion of users are conservative in their tastes for UI change... therefore ignore a non-negligible portion of your users.
That attitude is exactly what's wrong with the tech world today.
A significant number of people will complain at first even if the change doesn't hurt them. People just like the familiar - but then, they also eventually get bored with it! So damned if you do, damned if you don't...
So the takeaway isn't "ignore them" it's "listen closely enough to be able to tell 'is this just a reflex or did I unintentionally hamper their use of the app in a way I didn't anticipate?'" Can they still get their stuff done easily, once they get accustomed to the new way, or are there things we actually made unnecessarily worse?
>> It was a major change, and many power users (people managing multiple accounts or brand accounts) pointed out that it made their work a lot harder and more prone to error.
> hard to take any particular moment of outrage too seriously.
Apparently 'outrage' is when dedicated users mention their work was made more difficult and prone to error.
The HN community can listen to customer feedback better than this.
Until about Snow Leopard pretty much every Mac OS X update was almost universally considered much better than the ones before (though the truism that you avoid a new Mac OS X update on a primary computer till 10.x.1 still held).
> Does Snapchat not have any user feedback in their design
Apparently they don't even solicit feedback from their own inhouse employees, so I doubt they solicit it from control groups / influential users
> Compared to the "dogfooding" tradition in many tech companies, where employees try out their products before releasing them to the public, most Snap employees don't know when a new product is coming — regardless if it would affect their team's long-term metrics or goals. When the company launched Lenses, its famous filters that morph people's faces, most employees learned about it for the first time on the company blog post announcing it to the world.
The lesson for Snapchat, and really any new software company, is that design updates need to roll out slowly. You cannot drop a boat load of changes on users. Facebook learned this early on when they introduced the new wall and news feed. Now they allow you to preview design changes before they get fully rolled out.
The design changes aren't necessarily bad, it still looks and operates fine. Snapchat just made the rookie mistake of changing everything at once before anyone could orient themselves around the changes.
Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter all did this. They're all spammy and terribly broken crapholes which I now barely use. If there were viable alternatives I'd eliminate that barely.
I'm also suspicious of the amount of testing that's being done. More than once the app was posting a completely black pic for every snap, lasting at least a couple days. I stopped using it after this last time it started doing that again.
Being in the beta program, I've been dealing with the redesign for a few months now. I've mostly forgotten what the major changes were, but: I'm happy that the advertising "Discover" crap is put away on its own page, and I hate how hard it is to view my friends' stories now.
>>My question is how does an update that is almost universally hated by the user base get through to production?
I think a lot of us are jealous of your work history right now - the answer to that question is almost always "the person who can fire me/signs my paycheck thought it was a good idea".
Reddit is looking like they might suffer a similar misstep. Not quite on the same level as Digg suffered for a number of reasons but still. They've been slowly rolling out and previewing a UI redesign. Comments on their UI redesign preview posts are overwhelmingly negative but they just keep pushing forward anyway. I don't understand why this is almost always the case.
It is usually because the design is some PM's means of getting promoted. It wouldn't look good if your work gets trashed. So it gets pushed all the way through and then they leave for greener pastures by touting the work they have done.
Someone else gets to reap the damage they have sown. But engineers do the same thing.
In this case, Snapchat just seems to be copying feeds to make money. And Wall Street is breathing down their necks.
Most redesigns go pretty deep before users are included. And by then your investment, financial, emotional and in lost time, is so high people try and rationalize the negative reactions and justify why users will turn around after a while.
What makes it difficult that even the most perfect change will elicit negative reactions from users. It's difficult to then separate what is a natural reaction to change from genuine problems in the new design.
Makes one wonder if Reddit has a moat. I liked their conservative design so far, but there seem to be cracks appearing the form of 'mobilization' of the user profile page for example.
Seems to be the trend of the last 5 years of making the desktop experience broken/annoying in some way or form and the mobile experience - ad-ridden and designed for momentary rather than deep engagement.
There have been attempts to do something else, such as voat, but those generally become either A) more akin to subreddits than reddit (like this very site) or B) ideological havens for groups not welcome on reddit.
In voat's case, when reddit begin banning overt racism from white supremacists and calls for violence, as well as communities dedicated to hating fat people or women, those radicalized users all fled to voat. That toxic core userbase makes the site untenable for the masses who are repulsed by such naked racism, prejudice and other evil content.
So I don't really see anyone waiting in the reddit wings. The ones that were there before are still there (SA, fark, /.), and the ones that follow aren't poised to be the same thing.
Reddit doesn’t have a moat, IMO, because they don’t have a social graph. It’s like Facebook for strangers. Someone could wipe them out over night because users don’t really have any connection to each other.
Yeah, I remembered Digg. It's fascinating (in a bad way, really) to see something so giant, suddenly crashed so hard in a very short period of time. I'm always wondering if reddit will go down that way too.
I really enjoy the update. I've posted this before, but I like the focus on my friends, the isolation of the branded content, and the ability to mute specific people's stories. I hope people get used to it rather than rolling it back or killing the app.
I'm possibly starting to age out of the target market, but Snapchat has done a great job of getting me move to Instagram stories for my "social media" type content (vs. individual targeted stuff, which Snapchat still works all right for).
This is the most important lesson for any service that depends on a community of users for survival: involve them in the update process, or you will scare them away. Even if the new version is objectively better (which is rare), unexpected changes cause confusion and anger.
I encourage anybody involved in making this kind of service to watch this[1] talk from NOTACON by Joe Peacock of fark.com about their experience deploying a surprise redesign, then compounding the anger with their infamous reply:
I use the app daily and I have to say while the new version is different and a bit rough, i still like where they are headed. With some tweaks I believe it will be better than the old and more confusing design
An experience redesign (vs a reskin) is saying you have something new good enough to justify disrupting your user's existing routines.
It's not clear to me what that new thing is in the new Snapchat UI. It seems better consolidated but less consistently sorted/organized. But for direct communication with friends, it's not really that different.
If anything, the redesign feels like an attempt to protect the core feature of Snapchat - the direct communication vs the spammy broadcasting - at the cost of a temporary hit to revenue. I don't see how it would make them more money in the short run.
I honestly have no idea how a celebrity would use the app, so it could easily be much worse for her, but that direct experience probably isn't relevant. Snapchat isn't Twitter. Twitter and Instagram seem to be dominated by "influencer" type stuff, which is why I practically never use them - Snapchat is better for talking to people I know. Trickier to monetize that, though.
Regardless, thanks to modern metrics ("spying" if you're uncharitable) Snapchat is doubtless aware of all the changes, so we'll see if further changes come or if this was just complaining-about-change.
Have to agree, the recent update is a head-scratcher. They made user stories considerably more confusing to use, and these same user stories are what made Snapchat successful and exciting to begin with.
I really think they should work to bring back the daily city/event stories too. For those that don't remember, they used to aggregate the biggest events and city stories on a daily basis and provide those front and center. Was a really unique way to experience a city across the world from where you are! They've since gotten rid of this, and moved it into a hidden "SnapMap" feature which is easily missed by many users.
>I really think they should work to bring back the daily city/event stories too.
I remember this showing me how great some places are across the world that I never thought of, when they were daily (or was it weekly?) a different city/country. At the risk of sounding ignorant, I remember learning just how modern and developed Namibia's urban life is from one of these.
If she were to short the stock and then posted a tweet is that illegal? Or the inverse if she bought the stock and posted a tweet? It seems like some of these social influencers have a lot of power.
As long as she's not employed/paid by snapchat and trades on her account - no, not illegal at all - she's a private citizen making a public statement with no insider knowledge -- her ability to _affect_ the security is not material (the board or auditors of SNAP _might_ be on the hook if "celebrity disinterest" wasn't listed in the known risks of their last quarterly -- I mean, that seems like a reach, but I'm not a lawyer, judge, securities expert, or fully functioning human being...).
Ethically, it might be nice if she disclosed a position, but she's [presumably] not a financial analyst or advisor, so she's got no duty to disclose.
I mean, if you were president, you could make good money for yourself and your friends just telling them which way you were going to tweet about a company a few minutes before you do -- if you didn't care about the appearance or ethics of it...
If Wall Street/investors are so out of touch that a vacuous tweet of a socialite can have so much effect, to me that’s a different issue entirely. Not to mention one reason this could happen is if the stock price was grossly overvalued in the first place. In general, I don’t see anything specifically illegal about this.
Kylie Jenner has 24.5 million twitter followers that presumably think somewhat similarly to her. I'm pretty sure that her thoughts on this matter are indicative of a larger trend that an investor would be wary to ignore.
A trend is more than one person, and as the article states her situation has recently changed. This is all a sign of pure laziness/hype/greed, instead of doing some actual market research before you make investment decisions. In any case, I’m not sure how much of her “thought” went into that tweet.
How do you arrive at calling Kyle Jenner vacuous? She has an audience and has been quite successful at monetizing. If she is vacuous then Snapchat and lot of other startups should be described the same way. Given the sales of her cosmetic line, a Wall Street investor would do well to listen to her when she thinks a service is over.
I guess market manipulation must be legal, for example remember that guy who shorted Herbalife then tried to manipulate its price downward?
Whatever made that legal must make what you propose legal too: after all she could say "I shorted the stock because I thought it was doomed; I shared my frustration on Twitter out of the same frustration."
That's quite hard to separate from "I shorted the stock because I knew that I could manipulate it into falling by tweeting a negative opinion about it."
It's funny, no one thinks it's a problem to buy a stock and then go tell people good, truthful about the company to try to get the stock to go up. But when you short a stock and then go say bad, truthful things about the company then people want to call it market manipulation.
Could someone explain to be why the new update is bad? I primarily use snapchat for my friends' stories. With the new update I no longer have to see ads under the stories, which is a positive for me.
Why I don’t like it is 3 fold: 2 major and 1 minor. The first is that my friend list is
1. Person I just Snapped
2. Person I just Snapped
3. Person I haven’t talked to in forever (but just posted to their story)
4. Person I haven’t talked to in forever
...
And there will be times I snap a person and go back on the friends list and their gone! Like they just don’t show up anywhere I have to search them to see if they opened my snap.
Second is that I have people (like family) who I don’t snap much but still look at their stories. In the new version I actually have to search them all Individually which is awful.
Third is minor but I find the friends list cluttered and difficult to process. Stories, Streaks, message notifications, scores, Bitmoji, names all cluttered into one single line item.
One reason that I used frequently is custom group stories, for example a friend group can have their own story where everyone can post/look at. They used to be grouped in with user stories, but now are in the "discover" feed buried within the sponsored content and are extremely difficult to find easily. So much so that a few that I am a part of are almost never used anymore.
To make a long story short, I used to be able to swipe to the right and see all my friends stories, sorted by last update time. Now it's some horrible Mish most of these stories on the "friends" page, and I can't see the stories I want to see.
> on the heels of a tweet from Kylie Jenner, who said she doesn’t open the app anymore. Whether it’s the demands of her newfound motherhood, or the recent app redesign, the testament drew similar replies from her 24.5 million followers. Wall Street analysts too, have begun to notice, citing recent user engagement trends noticed since the platform’s redesign.
So if it crashes even more, can we safely say it was caused by some of the "similar replies" on this HN thread? ;)
Yes, this is an important lesson about redesigns. I saw a couple people brush off the Snapchat redesign angst with, "Meh, people will get over it", usually with links to the (admittedly accurate) Oatmeal comic about Facebook layout changes [0]. And while that's certainly the case sometimes, don't count on it as a general rule: Digg demonstrated conclusively that a poorly-received redesign can torpedo the entire company. Proceed with caution.
Like any other company, it's important to diversify your revenue.
Snap tied itself heavily to flash-in-the-pan pop celebrities. It should also have cultivated other types of thought leaders from other groups if it wanted to be anything other than a flash-in-the-pan, itself.
If you don't think clearly, the hockey stick on the graph smacks you in the head.
I don't get it either, apparently a tech companies value is tied directly to and only to the size of its user base. I could never use the app effectively so I'm happy to hear it got a redesign of any kind.
Trump tweets about taxing European solar and stock in Vestas (wind power) drops 35% in two days, despite the company ringing in contract after contract...
Now a different reality tv star crashes $1.3 billion worth of value with a tweet about not using a platform?
Stock is quite frankly getting dumber than CryptoCurrency.
Cryptocurrency has always been catching up rather than ahead of the game in the speculation stupidity arena. I always have a good time when I read /r/wallstreetbets (even though they're pretty self-aware, it can still be hilarious).
Important to remember that it's often the same people speculating in both fields. Don't forget that next time some absurd scam coin gets a million dollar market cap
Crazy that we still use apps instead of protocols for feeds and video. What's the closest thing to an open substitute? I've been looking at Gajim for XMPP + video chat https://gajim.org/
So I read the article, but I've seen claims like this before: some event correlated with a stock dive equals "proof" the event caused it, when it turns out some other news got announced like a quarterly result. Is that what's going on here?
It's poorly disguised marketing for Kylie Jenner. Look at the "influence" she holds, wiping out $1.3B from Snapchat value! Wouldn't you want her to support your {thing}? Imagine how much value it would bring your product.
Replace Snap with something else. For example: "In One Tweet, Kylie Jenner Wiped Out $1.3B of Microsoft's Market Value" to see how ridiculous it can get, then think about why is that.
At this point it’s hard to think of a major app or OS that hasn’t done something to royally screw over its users with unwanted updates that changed everything for the worse.
There needs to be a mechanism for making certain user guarantees, especially once money has been exchanged. And arguably since “time is money”, if you have invested a certain amount of time in something that’s then been messed up by the provider, you should receive similar guarantees because you’ve essentially “paid” a lot for it.
One of the problems is that it’s just too easy for companies to radically revamp things freely. Open-source used to sort of defend against this with the forking option. Too many modern devices are now locked-down to the point where open-source isn’t feasible for much of the software you’re likely to need.
Another problem is that too many updates are able to lump the bad with the good. Perhaps we need a way to force entities to develop their software features in such a way that at least two independent classes of updates are feasible: for example, allowing users to skip stupid UI revamps without becoming completely unable to receive other bug fixes.
I’ve always found the rise of Snapchat a bit volatile. Their main audience is bound to lose interest and move to the next cool thing. Facebook at least has a utility, so it’s not only about where the ”cool kids are”.
Let's go into that a little more. Are you thinking that "exclusively for kids" is the message, and that you have to appeal to the demo to keep them?
Another major user hostile feature is viewing anything on Instagram: the images (main reason to be there, eh?) are hard to zoom or save. The videos have few options like speed or captions. They almost revel in "here's your fixed size picture frame, enjoy our choices".
I think SC wants to appeal to young people. Young people don't want their parents around. So SC needs to find a way to discourage older folks while not appearing outright hostile.
Solution? Create a somewhat frustrating user experience. For Some reason, younger people will tolerate that and older folks won't, thus you skew your demographics the direction you want.
It's not that the app is impossible to figure out, it's just that it has a lot of unnecessary friction. Another way of saying this is: Adults care more about good UI/UX than younger folks.
I realize there are a lot of assumptions in my argument here, but it is my best reasoning out of the situation.
> Adults care more about good UI/UX than younger folks.
I was thinking the opposite, almost. I would propose: kids care more about a fun instant experience (socializing) vs adults caring more about utility (I like this picture, can I zoom and save it?)
So it might be the lack of utility that drives the ancients off the site, not the lack of Pretty UI.
I think that is absolutely true, but I was talking about a different dimension than fun or utility-- which is simply frustration.
Things like, the pointless Team Snapchat messages that MUST be watched. The app sending notifications when someone is typing, and then when they send a message. This means for each message I receive, I effectively look at my phone twice.
And last but not least, if there's a gap in some not particularly exciting conversation I was having--my 40 year old brain can't remember what the heck we were talking about.
Seems to me Snapchat forgot the most important thing about a products profitability: the customers.