Last year Snap announced that its popular Snapchat messaging app would be undergoing a redesign. The reason behind this is because many felt that the current design was too confusing, and that the redesign would shake things up and appeal to more people. Unfortunately it had the opposite effect.Many seemed to dislike the new design, although back then Snap’s CEO Evan Spiegel had defended the changes. Fast forward half a year later, it seems that Spiegel has finally admitted that maybe it was too rushed. In a memo sent to employees and obtained by Cheddar, Spiegel admits that the redesign was rushed.
According to the memo, he wrote, “In our excitement to innovate and bring many new products into the world, we have lost the core of what made Snapchat the fastest way to communicate.” He also said, “The biggest mistake we made with our redesign was compromising our core product value of being the fastest way to communicate. Our redesigned algorithmic Friend Feed made it harder to find the right people to talk to, and moving too quickly meant that we didn’t have time to optimize the Friend Feed for fast performance. We slowed down our product and eroded our core product value.”
A report from several months ago revealed that Snap’s designers had actually warned against releasing the updated design, claiming that feedback from pre-testing wasn’t that good and that engagement metrics had actually dropped. Snap has since been making updates that does bring back some of the elements of the older/original design.