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Snapchat CEO's Leaked Memo On Survival (techcrunch.com)
In a 6,000-word leaked memo to Cheddar's Alex Heath, Snapchat's CEO Evan Spiegel attempts to revive employee morale with philosophy, tactics and contrition as Snap's share price sinks to an all-time low of around $8 -- half its IPO price and a third of its peak. TechCrunch reports: "The biggest mistake we made with our redesign was compromising our core product value of being the fastest way to communicate," Spiegel stresses throughout the memo regarding "Project Cheetah." It's the chat that made Snapchat special, and burying it within a combined feed with Stories and failing to build a quick-loading Android app have had disastrous consequences. Spiegel shows great maturity here, admitting to impatient strategic moves and outlining a cohesive path forward. There's no talk of Snapchat ruling the social app world here. He seems to understand that's likely out of reach in the face of Instagram's competitive onslaught. Instead, Snapchat is satisfied if it can help us express ourselves while finally reaching even meager profitability.
Snapchat may be too perceived as a toy to win enough adults, too late to win back international markets from the Facebook empire and too copyable by good-enough alternatives to grow truly massive. But if Snap can follow the Spiegel game plan, it could carve out a sustainable market through a small but loyal audience who want to communicate through imagery. The report goes on to highlight nine of the most interesting takeaways from the memo and why they're important. They include: "Apologizing for rushing the redesign; Chat is king; Snapchat must beat Facebook as best friends; Discover soars as Facebook Watch and IGTV stumble; But Discover is a mess; Aging up to earn money; Finally prioritizing developing markets; Fresh ideas, separate apps; and The freedom of profitability.
Snapchat may be too perceived as a toy to win enough adults, too late to win back international markets from the Facebook empire and too copyable by good-enough alternatives to grow truly massive. But if Snap can follow the Spiegel game plan, it could carve out a sustainable market through a small but loyal audience who want to communicate through imagery. The report goes on to highlight nine of the most interesting takeaways from the memo and why they're important. They include: "Apologizing for rushing the redesign; Chat is king; Snapchat must beat Facebook as best friends; Discover soars as Facebook Watch and IGTV stumble; But Discover is a mess; Aging up to earn money; Finally prioritizing developing markets; Fresh ideas, separate apps; and The freedom of profitability.
Yeah, pretty much everyone here predicted their big new overhaul was going to be a disaster. It was an easy prediction to make, since a) it involved UX folks, who always seem gung-ho to radically change stuff, and b) most people hate change.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Perhaps Banksy could help with that.
What is it with these websites pushing through terrible "redesigns"?
They get pages and pages of user hatred, and yet these CEO's seem to blindly trust these UI "Experts" anyway? Here's a hint - if your UI Expert says "Users don't know what they want; they will stick with it - they did with Youtube" - fire them. Users stuck with Youtube despite the UI changes (Youtube was heavily entrenched) - not because of them.
Reddit is going through a similar thing now - redesigns that appear to have been implemented by people who have no idea what the site is about, who it is for, and how it is used - it is almost as if they are designing to a hipster tablet template (oh right, it is because that is what they are doing).
At least Slashdot had the brains to dump Beta (at least I haven't seen it in years despite almost never logging in)
Or - and it just occured to me - is it some kind of monetization experiment all of these sites are pushing through? (it all makes sense)
120 characters should be enough for anybody
In my experience, UI and UX people have no idea how to do either. They just follow the industry trend (flat colors! no differentiation between text and links/actions! moar whitespace!! mobile-first!!!) regardless of any feedback. They are highly qualified User Experience Experts; nobody without a selection of colored pens and a boutique haircut is allowed to have an opinion on their work.
Some of the clever ones then use extremely stupid metrics to back up their design failures: "time on site is up 25%" (because users can't find/do what they want quickly), "user engagement is up" (people are clicking on more things, or scrolling past infinite lists of things, trying to find what they were looking for) "support tickets are down" (because you hid the support button behind a maze of ambiguous links).
Unfortunately we've passed into an age where form is more important than function. It doesn't matter if it works or not, so long as it's pretty.
We have reached an interesting point in computing history, where software trends are socially driven. In the past software was for function (balancing the checkbook, word processing, business, education), or entertainment (games, consuming information). Games in and of themselves tend to be trends, like other forms of entertainment such as movies. People play the game until they "beat" it or become bored of it, new games that are (supposedly) better in some way or another come along, people then play those games.
Social software is different, in that the software itself isn't the focus, but the connectivity it provides socially. The quality (or lack thereof) of the software has no impact on its popularity - as long as the software is basically functional and usable. Do you think that one single Facebook user chose to be on Facebook because of the features of their software? Of course not.
Snapchat had one major draw that really kickstarted it. Supposedly, the messages weren't saved and went away after a brief amount of time. That was right around the time there were several high profile cases of high school students getting in trouble for sending pictures / messages that were inappropriate to one another using FB Messenger and texting. Snapchat seemed like a solution to that, so youth adopted it as a way of having privacy among themselves. The other thing it had going for it was that it *wasn't* FB, and their parents (especially the moms) were totally embracing FB. Typical youth to do something different than their parents just to be different.
Snapchat's days are numbered. As are Facebook's (although FB has the money and a more generic, all-encompassing platform so it will hang on for several more years). The social software generations are vastly shorter than human generations, as indicated by massive trends that have already come and gone (Myspace, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, etc). It's safe to say that within the next three years something will come along that will be the end of Snapchat. Whenever your platform is based on the "anti" anything (doesn't matter if we're talking about styles of music or clothing or software), the days are numbered until the whims of people change again.
Better known as 318230.