Why Snapchat’s re-redesign will fail and how to fix it – TechCrunch

Snap screwed it all up jumbling messages and Stories, banishing creators to Discover, and wrecking auto-advance. Prideful of his gut instincts, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel refused to listen to the awful user reviews and declining usage. Now a study shows a 73% drop in user sentiment towards Snapchat, the app’s user count shrank in March, and its share price is way down.

Yet the re-redesign Snapchat is finally rolling out today in response won’t fix the problems. The company still fails to understand that people want a predictable app that’s convenient to lay back and watch, and social media stars are more similar to you and me than they are to news outlets producing mobile magazine-style Discover content.

There’s a much better path for Snapchat, but it will require an ego adjustment and a bigger reversal of the changes — philosophy be damned.

Here’s what Snapchat was, is becoming, and should be.

The Old Snapchat

Snapchat’s best design was in September 2016. It lacked sensible Stories sorting, and got some questionable changes before the big January 2018 redesign, but the fundamentals were there:

  • Left: Messages in reverse chronological order
  • Right: Stories from everyone in reverse chronological order with a carousel of ranked preview tiles in a carousel above or below Stories
  • Auto-Advance: Automatic and instant

The Broken Snapchat

Snapchat’s big January 2018 redesign did two smart things. It added more obvious navigation buttons to ease in new and adult users. And it made the Stories list algorithmically sorted so you’d see your best friends first rather than just who posts most often, as TechCrunch recommended last April.

But it introduced a bunch of other problems like pulling creators out of the Stories list, turning the inbox into chaos with ad-laden Stories, and breaking auto-advance so you have to watch an annoying interstitial between each friend. Spiegel stubbornly refused to listen to the poor feedback, saying “Even the complaints we’re seeing reinforce the philosophy. Even the frustrations we’re seeing really validate those changes. It’ll take time for people to adjust”. That quickly proved short-sighted.

  • Left: Messages and Stories from friends mixed together, sorted algorithmically
  • Right: Discover, sorted algorithmically, with influencers and people who don’t follow you back mixed in
  • Auto-Advance: Interstitial preview screens

The Re-Redesigned Snapchat

Users hated the redesign, initial reviews were mostly negative, and Snapchat’s growth fell to its lowest rate ever. After some tests, Today Snapchat tells us it’s rolling out the re-redesign to the majority of iOS users that’s a little less confusing. Yet it doesn’t address the core problems, plus makes the Discover screen more overwhelming and ditches the smart sorting of friends’ Stories:

  • Left: Messages sorted reverse chronologically
  • Right: Friends’ Stories at the top sorted reverse chronologically, then subscriptions to creators sorted algorithmically, then Discover channels sorted algorithmically
  • Auto-Advance: Interstitial preview screens

The Right Snapchat

While the re-redesign makes Snapchat’s messaging inbox work like it used to, it reintroduces the problem of an unsorted Story list that’s dominated by whoever posts most often. It also leaves auto-advance broken out of a misguided hope of ensuring you never watch a frenemy or ex’s Story by accident and show up in their view counts. But that’s not worth ruining the laid-back viewing experience we’ve grown to love on Instagram Stories, and could be better solved with a mute button or just getting people to unfriend those they can’t be seen watching.

That’s why I recommend Snapchat move to a hybrid of all its designs:

  • Left: Messages sorted reverse chronologically
  • Right: Stories from all friends and creators, sorted algorithmically to preference close friends
  • Further Right: Discover, with sections for subscriptions, publishers, and Our Stories/Maps/Events
  • Auto-Advance: Traditional instant auto-advance without interstitials, plus a mute button to hide people

This design would make the inbox natural and uncluttered, ensure you see all your closest friends’ Stories, keep influencers from being buried in Discover, give publishers and Snapchat’s own content recommendations including new creators room to breathe, and let you easily relax and watch a ton of Stories in a row.

Snapchat could have slowly iterated its way to this conclusion. It could have done extensive beta testing of each change to ensure it didn’t misstep. And perhaps facing an existential crisis from the exceedingly viable alternatives Instagram and WhatsApp, it should never have attempted a sweeping overhaul of its app’s identity. Twitter’s conservative approach to product updates looks wiser in retrospect.

Cool read from TC Source Link

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Google’s new Tour Creator lets students make their own VR tours – TechCrunch

Image
Google today launched a new tool for teachers and their students called Tour Creator, which allows anyone to create their own VR tour using imagery from Google’s Street View or their own 360-degree photos. The new app is designed to work with Google Cardboard and Google’s existing VR “field trips” app Expeditions . The goal with Expeditions is to let people virtually travel the world to see far off places they may never have the chance to visit in person – like Antarctica or Machu Picchu, for example. Google says that since Expeditions’ arrival in 2015, over three million students have virtually visited places around the globe. Now, the idea is to let students and teachers themselves build their own VR experiences and stories without needing technical knowledge. Instead, using Tour Creator, anyone can build an immersive 360-degree tour from their computer. To use the service, you click to get started, give the tour a name and upload a cover photo. You can then search through Go
Read more

New malware highjacks your Windows clipboard to change crypto addresses – TechCrunch

Image
In what amounts to be an amazingly nefarious bit of malware, hackers have created an exploit that watches 2.3 million high-value crypto wallets and replaces the addresses in the Windows clipboard with an address associated with the hackers. In other words, you could paste your own wallet address – 3BYpmdzASG7S6WrpmrnzJCX3y8kduF6Kmc, for example – and the malware would subtly (or unsubtly) change it to its own private wallet. Because it happens in the clipboard most people wouldn’t notice the change between copying and pasting. Security researchers at BleepingComputer have found similar hijackers in the wild but this latest version is actively watching valuable wallets and trying grab bitcoin as they enter the accounts. Below is an example of the malware at work. The malware runs a massive, 83MB DLL file that masquerades as a Direct X service. Inside the DLL is a 2.5 million line text file full of bitcoin addresses. In the above test when cutting and pasting from an HTML page into W
Read more

Bitcoin passes $7K bringing all 100 top coins up with it – TechCrunch

Image
Bitcoin is moving up, and it’s taking 99 of its best friends along for the ride. In the last 24 hours, every one of the top 100 coins by market cap was in the green with 84 of them posting gains of over 5 percent. At the time of writing, Bitcoin was sitting at $7,310, up 14 percent in the last 7 days and up almost 10 percent in the last 24 hours. CoinMarketCap Top 100 Bitcoin itself crossed the $7,000 mark for the first time in the last month, an indication but no sure sign that it might be shaking off a summer slump that’s seen prices plunge below $6,000 on more than one occasion. Bitcoin is quickly moving back toward early June norms around $7,500 though may meet resistance at $7,750 . In March, Bitcoin dipped below the $10,000 mark and it’s been unable to mount a rally back above that level in the months since. screenshot via CoinMarketCap They may not last, but mid-July’s gains aren’t just a Bitcoin story. Out of the top 100 coins, 24 coins made double digit gains in the l
Read more