The results are in, and they’re not good.
Snapchat’s controversial redesign is officially a flop, with its parent company, Snap Inc., reporting on Tuesday a paltry 4 million new daily users joined the app during Q1 — 3 million less than Wall Street projected, and the fewest amount Snap has added as a public company. Dig deeper and it only gets worse for Snap, with its 2.13 percent growth rate the worst in the company’s history.
CEO Evan Spiegel acknowledged the redesign has been a dud in his prepared remarks, and said the company is now tweaking the redesign by putting Stories on the right side of the app.
“We learned that combining watching Stories and communicating with friends into the same place made it harder to optimize for both competing behaviors,” said Spiegel. “We are currently rolling out an update to address this by sorting communication by recency and moving Stories from friends to the right side of the application, while maintaining the structural changes we have made around separating friends from creators and sorting friends’ Stories by relationships.”
The move comes only months after Snap moved all Stories and messages from friends to the left side of the app, leaving the right side for content from social stars and Snap’s publishing partners. Many loyal users weren’t thrilled with the redesign to begin with; earlier this year, 1.2 million users signed a petition for Snapchat to revert back to its classic design. Maybe this redesigned redesign will work out better.