This week’s case study: Snapchat redesigned everything. Users burned it down.
In 2018, Snapchat shipped a major redesign.
The logic was sound. Stories from friends were getting buried next to Stories from celebrities and brands. Discovery was a mess. They separated the two sides: left for people you know, right for media and publishers.
Within weeks, a petition to revert it hit 1.2 million signatures. Kylie Jenner tweeted that she didn’t use Snapchat anymore and the stock dropped 6% in a day. Daily active user growth stalled for the first time.
Snapchat’s CEO Evan Spiegel doubled down publicly. He said the confusion was the point. That it would take time. That the right call isn’t always the comfortable one.
He wasn’t entirely wrong about the reasoning. He was wrong about the cost.
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Here’s your case challenge this week:
You’re the PM on this project the week after launch. The data is ugly. Leadership is split. Half the team thinks you just need to hold the line and let users adjust. Half thinks you ship a rollback immediately.
What do you do?
Option A: Hold. The redesign solves a real structural problem. User backlash at this scale is almost always loudest in week one. You give it 60 days and measure retention, not noise.
Option B: Partial rollback. You revert the friend/media separation but keep the UX improvements underneath. Give users back the familiar structure while preserving the real gains.
Option C: Full rollback, full reset. The scale of the reaction tells you something fundamental broke. You go back to what worked, study what users actually do, and redesign from their behaviour up instead of from principles down.
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This week’s case study: Snapchat redesigned everything. Users burned it down.
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