Snapchat's Recent Redesign Resulted in Millions of Lost Users

Snapchat's controversial redesign, introduced last November, caused it to lose millions of subscribers according to data shared today in its second quarter earnings results.

Snap said it had 188 million daily active Snapchat users during the second quarter of 2018, down from 191 million during the first quarter of the year.

In prepared remarks [PDF] on Snapchat's performance, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said that the two percent decline in daily active users was "primarily driven" by a lower frequency of use among the company's user base due to "the disruption caused by our redesign."

Spiegel said that Snapchat is working to iterate and improve the app based on community feedback, and he says that the major frustrations have been addressed.

While our Monthly Active Users continued to grow this quarter, we saw a 2 percent decline in our Daily Active Users. This was primarily driven by a slightly lower frequency of use among our user base due to the disruption caused by our redesign.

It has been approximately six months since we broadly rolled out the redesign of our application, and we have been working hard to iterate and improve Snapchat based on the feedback from our community. We feel that we have now addressed the biggest frustrations we've heard and are eager to make more progress on the tremendous opportunity we now have to show more of the right content to the right people.

Following the release of the redesigned app, more than 1.2 million users signed a petition asking for the change to be reversed.

In response, Snap rolled back some of the design changes, reverting Snaps and Chats back to chronological order and re-adding Stories from friends to the right side of the app. Snap also reintroduced the feature that allowed it to open up in camera mode, and users can again swipe left to view posts from friends.

The redesign of the app was initially aimed at appealing to a broader demographic and expanding Snapchat's user base, but Snapchat users were not prepared for the drastic change and did not become accustomed to the redesign as Snap had hoped.

Despite the fact that it's number of daily active users dropped, Snapchat brought in $262 million in revenue, an increase of 44 percent year-over-year.

Tag: Snapchat

Top Rated Comments

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Appleaker

1 week ago

No surprise really, I don’t know why certain companies are so disconnected with users when they redesign their software. Microsoft has a similar situation with Skype. And the worse part is that they think they know better, but really it just results in the loss of users. A particularly bad move in Snapchats case since Instagram was already taking over, this redesign was the last straw for many.

Rating: 9 Votes

bladerunner2000

6 days ago at 07:10 pm

Isn't snapchat mainly for kids?

Rating: 9 Votes

Hazmat401

6 days ago at 07:09 pm

And what is with social media not giving us our feeds in chronilogical order... I dont want to see my feed from 3 hours first.... I wanna see the feed from 5 mins ago

Very irritating

Rating: 9 Votes

Aston441

1 week ago

I stopped using it because I can only stay logged into one device at a time. Nothing else I use had this limitation and I can't see any justification for it.

PITA

Rating: 8 Votes

Superhappytree

6 days ago at 12:06 am

In my opinion social media, especially Snapchat, has ruined society.

It is addictive poison. I’m so tired and bored of it all at this point. I’m tired of scrolling and tapping and scrolling and tapping through crap that I deep down don’t really care about. I used to love Snapchat and I didn’t stop using it because of the update, I just really can’t be bothered with it anymore, same with Instagram. I have no idea how people post multiple selfies every day 364 days a year amongst other crap. I used to post some myself but then realised how weird, pointless, and ridiculous it is. It makes you become so self absorbed, then again it does tend to attract narcissists the most but it only increases narcissistic behaviour in general. Many people post multiple stories to both their Snapchat and Instagram. Every. Damn. Day. It is pure madness and yet people don’t realise it and are perfectly okay with constantly doing it. Once you take a big step back away from it all though and see it from a birds eye point of view you soon realise how nuts it all is.

I also realised that I just kept seeing slightly different variations of the same s*** every single day. I don’t think many people realise that is exactly what they are doing because they are so consumed by it all. You could go cold turkey for a month and when you go back you haven’t missed anything that you haven’t already seen many times before really. It also wasn’t making me feel good seeing everyone with these supposed ‘perfect’ lives, it was making me anxious and miserable constantly comparing myself to others. I haven’t comlpletely quit it yet but I already feel better now that I’m not checking it as much.

Rating: 7 Votes

palmerc2

6 days ago at 08:37 pm

In my opinion social media, especially Snapchat, has ruined society.

Rating: 7 Votes

nt5672

6 days ago at 07:45 pm

Because UI designers think they are the cat's meow of the web/app. Just look at the poor UI from modern web sites and you will understand that being modern no longer means being the most usable. Modern UI is a fashion, just like modern technology design. For me its time to bring back the engineers and get rid of the fashionistas.

Being the technical leader of a team that redesigned a top web site I can tell you from personal experience that neither I nor the head of marketing were correct when we tried to predict the outcome of usability studies. Things we thought did not need to be tested because they were proven in practice turned out to be dead wrong, at least for our user base.

We ended up spending more money on usability testing than on web site development. Something most people are too arrogant to acknowledge as necessary. But we made a significant improvement in sales directly attributed to the usability improvements. The science is there, but it is being grossly ignored.

Rating: 6 Votes

kirky29

6 days ago at 10:19 pm

The app has become redundant since Instagram introduced stories

The problem with stories on Instagram is that it doesn't feel personal, with Snapchat my direct everyday friends send me photos, like those pointless ones of 'oooh look at this nice car'. Instagram is full of people trying to sell me things or of random beaches and their vacation pics.

Rating: 4 Votes

Nick A

1 week ago

Not surprised. The re-design was awful. There was nothing wrong with the way it was before and no reason to change it, especially in such a drastic way that alters its functionality.

Rating: 4 Votes