Since the platform’s last redesign, Snapchat has had to face a backlash of controversy from users. Things only got worse when Kylie Jenner decided that she was ‘sooo over’ the social media site. This sunk shares in the company by almost 8%, taking them back to the $17 price that were listed when the company first graced the stock market in March 2017.
A downward spiral
To try and smooth things over, Snap hosted a number of publishers in New York and Los Angeles at day-long summits. They wanted feedback from the redesign that had separated Snap’s media partners in their own little corner of the app, away from photos and videos from friends.
People weren’t happy with the update – deeming it cluttered and confusing, with one publisher describing the New York summit – “There was a lot of venting, a lot of aired grievances.”
Concerns only deepened as Snap began to lose its edge against Instagram, who had unapologetically copied off Snapchat’s features and cut its market value in half.
Is Snapchats charm fading away?
A new survey by YouGov Brand Index now shows just how much this redesign affected the public’s perception of the app. Snapchat’s user sentiment has fallen by a staggering 73% following the full rollout of the design:
Its user sentiment — measured by having consumers rank their impression of a brand on a scale of 100 for “very positive” to -100 for “very negative” — among 18- to 34-year-old U.S. consumers declined 73 percent.
On this same scale, millennials fell from a high of 30 down to a low of 8 and user satisfaction fell from 27 to a low of 12 in the last month. Millennials make up for a huge amount of Snapchat’s target user group and, in the past, have proved to be incredibly hard to win back. Snapchat’s never-ending battle with Facebook-owned Instagram is another thing that’s fuelling the fire.
Snapchat has stood firm regarding it’s decision to redesign, with CEO Evan Spiegel stating that people would get used to it over time. However, last month the company started testing another redesign of its redesign that reimagines how Stories are portrayed. Stories will now be returned to the far-right Discover page.
All users will soon see the update, as Recode reports:
Snap is rolling out this redesigned redesign to most iOS users. It’s also eliminating the messaging inbox algorithm it used to prioritize some messages over others. Now, all messages in the inbox will appear in reverse-chronological order (like they used to).
Snapchat’s initial success came from its simplicity, but now it seems as though they took this for granted. Instagram has undoubtedly taken over the social media landscape and Snapchat will need something much more powerful than a redesign to come back into the game, increasing investor pressure as time goes on.
