Snap is testing a “simplified version of Snapchat,” CEO Evan Spiegel wrote in a letter to employees posted on Snap’s website Tuesday. The CEO says the simplified version is aimed at improving the platform’s accessibility and ease of use. For those who remember Snapchat’s 2018 redesign, this news may do little to boost confidence.
Spiegel sought to lift employee spirits with his letter on Tuesday after a dismal year for the company’s stock price, which has fallen nearly 50% in 2024.
“Investors are concerned that we are not growing faster,” Spiegel said in the letter.
Snapchat’s “simplified” version may be an attempt to appeal to older users, who have historically been put off by the app’s unintuitive design. Snapchat is much better at appealing to a younger audience, who seem to just understand the app. But this isn’t the first time Snapchat has tried to reconcile these issues.
You might remember Snap’s 2017 earnings call, when Spiegel admitted that he’d heard that “Snapchat is hard to understand or use,” particularly for older people. Months later, Snap rolled out a major redesign to win back those users, sandwiching Stories between private messages, among other changes that ended up angering more users than it attracted.
A 2018 Change.org petition to “remove the new Snapchat update” received 1.2 million signatures, while famous influencers including Kylie Jenner, Chrissy Teigen and Marques Brownlee expressed their frustration. But worse, the redesign tanked the platform’s ad views and revenue, alienating its younger user base and failing to attract older people. By May 2018, Snap was struggling to reverse some of the changes.
Spiegel writes in Tuesday’s letter that early tests of the simplified redesign have been “generally positive,” though the CEO notes that “we will be thoughtful and deliberate about making a change of this magnitude.” He’s almost certainly alluding to the 2018 redesign failure, which I’m sure no one at Snap has forgotten.
The announcement of a new, simplified version of Snapchat played into Spiegel’s broader musings on Snap’s business strategy. He claimed that Snap’s foray into the augmented reality glasses market (which it calls Spectacles) would create a market without competitors. Perhaps he’s pretending that Meta’s augmented reality glasses, Meta Ray-Bans, simply don’t exist?
In an effort to boost Snapchat’s struggling advertising division, Spiegel also announced new ad placements, called Sponsored Snaps and Promoted Places. The former allows advertisers to send Snapchats directly to users’ chat inboxes, and the latter allows advertisers to promote destinations on Snap Map.
