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Snapchat's Big Redesign Bashed In 83 Percent of User Reviews (techcrunch.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the new-and-not-so-approved dept.

The new Snapchat redesign that jams Stories in between private messages is not receiving a whole lot of praise. "In the few countries including the U.K., Australia, and Canada where the redesign is widely available, 83 percent of App Store reviews (1,941) for the update are negative with one or two stars, according to data by mobile analytics firm Sensor Tower," reports TechCrunch. "Just 17 percent, or 391 of the reviews, give it three to five stars." From the report: The most referenced keywords in the negative reviews include "new update," "Stories," and "please fix." Meanwhile, Snapchat's Support Twitter account has been busy replying to people who hate the update and are asking to uninstall it, noting "It's not possible to revert to a previous version of Snapchat," and trying to explain where Stories are to confused users. Hopes were that the redesign could boost Snapchat's soggy revenue, which fell short of Wall Street earnings expectations in Q3 and led to a loss of $443 million. The redesign mixes Stories, where Snapchat shows ads but which have seen stagnation in sharing rates amidst competition from Instagram Stories, into the more popular messaging inbox, where Snapchat's ephemeral messaging is more differentiated and entrenched.

16 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. As with any other website redesign... by Albert71292 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They'll get over it.

    --
    "A Bird In The Hand Will Poop On Your Wrist"-Benny Hill,1982
    1. Re:As with any other website redesign... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      They'll get over it.

      Sounds like something a Progressive hipster who presumes to know better than you would say.

  2. Remember Slashdot beta? by manu0601 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It is always the same story. Someone thinks the site needs to be refreshed, but users do not like change for the sake of it, especially about user interfaces.

    1. Re:Remember Slashdot beta? by Baron_Yam · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Unless there is something wrong with the current interface, updating for the sake of it is something that keeps marketing types employed but doesn't achieve much else that's positive.

      Essentially, you're throwing away your users' familiarity with your interface and annoying them. They don't want to have to re-learn how to use your site... they want to engage the minimum possible number of brain cells required to participate.

      However, marketing folks are GOOD at marketing, and one of the things they can sell people on is the need for marketing people, and they do that by first convincing you to listen to marketing people. When they form an unholy union with sales and convince people the changes can increase revenue... look out, change is coming.

      Because it's not the users who matter, it's the customers.

    2. Re:Remember Slashdot beta? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Unless there is something wrong with the current interface, updating for the sake of it is something that keeps marketing types employed but doesn't achieve much else that's positive.

      Essentially, you're throwing away your users' familiarity with your interface and annoying them. They don't want to have to re-learn how to use your site... they want to engage the minimum possible number of brain cells required to participate.

      The same thing happened with one of my banks recently, the website stayed the same for over a decade and suddenly underwent a total redesign that utterly destroys the workflow that I had going. Now not only does it take extra steps to do everything but their "tablet friendly or something" design requires absurd amount of scrolling as there is no longer a way to see all of my sub-accounts on one screen anymore.

    3. Re:Remember Slashdot beta? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It is always the same story. Someone thinks the site needs to be refreshed, but users do not like change for the sake of it, especially about user interfaces.

      I don't care if the UI changes, but it needs to change to something usable.

      That Slashdot beta was so bad that I stopped visiting Slashdot altogether.
      It took me six months to realize they had reverted the beta, and that was because I accidentally followed a link.

    4. Re:Remember Slashdot beta? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Ever notice how Amazon has basically had the same Dotcom 1.0 aesthetics forever? And how Jeff Bezos is the richest man on the planet? Maybe ridiculous interface refreshes with the latest hipster look and feel are not so good after all.

    5. Re:Remember Slashdot beta? by dfm3 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      GP wasn't talking about the flashy sliding stuff, but about the content layout. Things you'll still see on Amazon's website, that many other websites have eliminated in favor of "streamlining" the "user experience":

      - No hamburger menus. They still dare to hide their menus behind descriptive words.
      - Long lists actually have page numbers at the bottom, instead of infinitely scrolling.
      - Everything's black text on white, with blue links, and prices in dark red. Lots of bold text everywhere. Virtually no pale thin fonts on pastel backgrounds.
      - Not one, but TWO site maps at the bottom of the page!
      - Minimal white space. By modern "UX" design, most pages are actually considered cluttered. Not quite "Yahoo 1996" cluttered, but still very information dense.

      And you know what? It works. I can usually get from where I am to where I want to be with no more than a couple clicks, and I spend longer on each page because there's so much info to digest. That means I'm more likely to notice all the other "impulse buy" items on the sidebar, which is probably their goal.

  3. Web 3.0 is a pile of shit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This whole "responsive" design (slow, bloated, ajax-on-meth pile of shit) shift and "mobile" revolution has been a wholesale disaster.

    • Websites are slower, less usable, less useful, and even more ad and spyware ridden than they were so much as 3 years ago.
    • Mainstream, text-only websites now take 20s to load on i5s, need megabytes of css and and javascript code to even display images.
    • Even the best Web 2.0 sites have degraded, losing functionality, common sense, text on buttons, borders on buttons for Christsake.
    • Mammoth advances bandwidth, storage, latency, processor power and memory are mullified as fast as Node.js can devour them.
    • Every page is now an app

    Brutal reality: Websites were better when IE6 was still around.
    When we didn't have standards. When "Designers" didn't have the ability to treat the browser as a turning machine and hijack everything about it. When sites pretended to give a shit about bandwidth.

    Web 3.0 is a pile of shit.
    http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
    http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

    1. Re:Web 3.0 is a pile of shit by sqorbit · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You forgot to type "Get Off My Lawn" at the end of that post.

      --
      Sent from my TARDIS
  4. Retarded millennial hipsters by Hognoxious · · Score: 2, Funny

    Retarded millennial hipsters producing shitty designs because they're retarded millennial hipsters...

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    1. Re:Retarded millennial hipsters by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Yeah but that's also their target audience.

  5. A design upgrade isn't a good enough reason by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You need to add a feature or something that makes the design update the AFTERTHOUGHT, as they're wowed by how simple and powerful the new version is. If you're drawing attention to something trivial and it also sucks, congratulations yes that's going to bite you. Fortunately nobody will miss this app in 2 years when it's replaced by something more hip and wowfactor.

  6. What's a 'snapchat'? by gdonald · · Score: 2

    Is that available on EFnet?

  7. Any UI change you implement needs to pass the test by Opportunist · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Mostly the test of the user of "enhanced experience" against the discomfort of having to move his ass. Any change is first met with resistance. It could be the best, most intuitive UI in the history of UIs and the user will first meet it with hostility. It's different, it ain't what he is used to and most of all using it without having to use half a brain cell, i.e. what he was used to if it was a tool he used every day for hours, is no longer an option. He has to learn again. People do not like that.

    So whenever you do something like this, you HAVE TO give the user something he really, really, REALLY wants to compensate and overcome that reluctance. It needn't even be anything great. Not even anything useful. Any kind of convenience goodie may well do the trick.

    Without, your UI is doomed.

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  8. Chekov died because of this crap by nctritech · · Score: 2

    I'd just like to point out that user interface design changes for no good reason other than change's sake resulted in the death of Chekov's actor, Anton Yelchin. While Snapchat's UI is unlikely to result in death, the point remains the same: once users buy into an interface and grow the skill set to use it well, you can't shake it up in any major way without causing serious problems and pissing off a lot of people. Microsoft made a major change in Office 2007 with the "ribbon" that user testing indicated was necessary and was successful in reducing hunting and whatnot, yet that stupid ass ribbon and the shuffling of formatting options to hidden places without decent discoverability is still an enormous pain in the ass for me to use even today. It used to be that I could right-click on text and get paragraph and character formatting boxes with everything but the kitchen sink in them organized into wonderfully neat hierarchical tabs. Now every time I want to do something that doesn't start with B/I/U I have to go on an Easter egg hunt.

    Changing user interfaces willy-nilly kills well-known actors and pisses off millions of teenagers. Don't do it.