Seems to me Snapchat forgot the most important thing about a products profitability: the customers.
Evan Spiegel is convinced that he's the second coming of Steve Jobs. http://www.businessinsider.com/what-its-like-to-work-at-snap...
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-...
That's entirely different from "they will complain no mater what you do so you should ignore them".
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.
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.
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.
Mac OS X Tiger over Mac OS X Panther
Windows 7 over Windows Vista
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.
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?
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."
The point is users are ancillary, not the primary means of revenue. Whenever there is that mismatch, you'll have issues like this.
What do you dislike about it?
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".
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.
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.
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.
2 - Instagram copies the idea and improved the interface
3 - Company becomes irrelevant
4 - Rinse/repeat