Snapchat Under Fire

Snapchat – one of the most popular forms of social media nowadays (especially with millennial users) – has come under a lot of criticism recently over their redesign.

According to PC Mag, over 30 different Change.org petitions began right after the update dropped in the US.

The Update

Personally, I use Snapchat regularly and I also disliked the update immediately. It’s tougher to see stories from people that you want to see, and until now, the interface had remained pretty much unchanged for as long as I’ve used it.

The new interface could lead to one of the tabs being similar to Facebook’s News Feed, and definitely has more potential to expose consumers to advertising and may encourage more consumers to subscribe to channels they would’ve never seen otherwise.  This is good for Snapchat’s bottom line, as well as the many “channels” on Snapchat.

They’ve Already Responded

Snapchat isn’t ignoring the criticism, and CEO Evan Spiegel even doubled down on their changes, saying the critics “really validate those changes. And it’ll take time to for people to adjust.”

The company as a whole, however, has already responded to the petition on Change.org saying that they will be bringing us an update over the next few weeks that will introduce a sort of middle-ground, so people are able to navigate it a little easier.

Summary

The kneejerk reaction to Snapchat’s redesign was that it’s terrible, and we should go back immediately. However, I also remember when switching to a keyboard-less phone was intimidating, and it took some prodding for me to give up my buttons. Now what do we think of phones with keyboards?

They probably made the change so that they can try to appeal to more non-millennial consumers by using a Facebook-like news feed, but they might’ve changed too many things too fast. While I’m not a fan of the redesign, there’s no way I’m going to delete Snapchat because of it, and in a month or two I might be used to the new interface and think the old one is outdated and old-school. I’m sure Snapchat did a lot of research into the new user experience, and decided that the new design is better.

Or perhaps they made a mistake and will end up reverting all the way. Mistakes do happen.