In One Tweet, Kylie Jenner Wiped Out $1.3B of Snap's Market Value
bloomberg.com
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Seems to me Snapchat forgot the most important thing about a products profitability: the customers.
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.
When you are selling beef, do you worry about how the cows feel about it?
The point is users are ancillary, not the primary means of revenue. Whenever there is that mismatch, you'll have issues like this.
If you don't care about the welfare of your cows they will not grow as large and you'll have less product to sell.
Putting that in more literal terms, if you damage the user experience you will damage user engagement and your ad revenue is going to fall.
There's certainly tricks to treat the cows poorly and still profit for a while but this sort of behavior has killed many companies.
To use an animal aphorism used in the context of Wall St, "Bulls run, pigs get slaughtered."
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-...
Mac OS X Tiger over Mac OS X Panther
Windows 7 over Windows Vista
That's entirely different from "they will complain no mater what you do so you should ignore them".
I don't think you should be given free reign to just accept outrage because that's the way you think things need to be.
You ultimately need to continually make improvements, not change for change sake.
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.
Determine the ongoing cost of maintaining two different user interfaces versus the benefit of permitting users to choose their preferred interface.
If properly engineered, with low impedance mismatch between API and UI, the cost could be kept reasonably low for most applications.
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?
> 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.
If you have a moat, you can weather the storm after a design snafu. If you don't? @Jack, you dead.
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.
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.
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.
Evan Spiegel is convinced that he's the second coming of Steve Jobs. http://www.businessinsider.com/what-its-like-to-work-at-snap...
2 - Instagram copies the idea and improved the interface
3 - Company becomes irrelevant
4 - Rinse/repeat
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".
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.
Source: OP.
What do you dislike about it?
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:
> You'll get over it.
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.
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 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.
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.
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."
There is a difference between insuring a house you want to live in and insuring a house you want to burn down.
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...
I'll go out on a limb & say you're not a lawyer.
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.
So if it crashes even more, can we safely say it was caused by some of the "similar replies" on this HN thread? ;)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/pda/2010/aug/31/digg-...
[0]: http://theoatmeal.com/pl/state_web_winter/facebook_layout
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.
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.
Although upon further thought - you're more likely to be right that it's just clickbait.
>Revenue: $285.7 million versus $252.9 million estimated, according to a Thomson Reuters consensus estimate.
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.
Ouch. Sounds like she should have been a beta tester of the revamped site. In other words "don't bite the hand that tweets you." I'll let myself out.
Like MySpace.
This is how they keep adults off their platform.
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".
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.
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.
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.