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).
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.
1. https://in30minutes.com/hootsuite-takes-the-low-road-blames-...