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The lesson for Snapchat, and really any new software company, is that design updates need to roll out slowly. You cannot drop a boat load of changes on users. F
by jbob2000 9y ago
The lesson for Snapchat, and really any new software company, is that design updates need to roll out slowly. You cannot drop a boat load of changes on users. Facebook learned this early on when they introduced the new wall and news feed. Now they allow you to preview design changes before they get fully rolled out.
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.
- noblethrasher 9y agoeBay is a famous case study of this: https://theuxblog.com/blog/redesigning-user-experience https://theuxblog.com/blog/redesigning-user-experience
- Spooky23 9y agoIt’s typical tech hubris. For a consumer product, changes that are convenient to product development are almost always shitty for the customer.
- noobermin 9y agoThe issue here is assuming that the users of said sites are their customers. They are not. When you are selling beef, do you worry about how the cows feel about it?
- _r_o_y_ 9y agoYou do if it affects the way the beef sells.
- noobermin 9y agoRight. Was going to add that ammendum, but didn't get around to it. The point is users are ancillary, not the primary means of revenue. Whenever there is that mismatch, you'll have issues like this.
- the-pigeon 9y agoYou might not but you should. 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.
- Spooky23 9y agoLike I said, tech hubris. If you don't feed the cow, you won't be selling too much beef. To use an animal aphorism used in the context of Wall St, "Bulls run, pigs get slaughtered."
- radicalbyte 9y agoFacebook, LinkedIn and Twitter all did this. They're all spammy and terribly broken crapholes which I now barely use. If there were viable alternatives I'd eliminate that barely.