Snap wants to win over new, older users – again.
After years of criticism over its steep learning curve, Snap is trying to make its 13-year-old app more user friendly with an interface overhaul announced in September. The redesign is called Simple Snapchat.
“For Snapchatters, this updated layout offers a more personal, relevant, and easy-to-use interface,” said CEO Evan Spiegel at Snap’s Partner Summit in September.
But this planned redesign comes at an even more fragile moment for the company than the last failed attempt in 2018. Snap shares have fallen around 85% from 2021 peaks. A changing advertising market and new privacy restrictions are among the pressures facing the company, which only recently began to reverse the last two years of declining revenue growth.
The company’s financials paint a mixed picture. Losses in its most recent quarter totaled $153 million, an improvement from $368 million in the same period last year. Thanks to a humming economy and improved digital ad market, analysts project that Snap will rake in $5.4 billion in revenue in 2024, but still expect continued annual losses totalling $767 million.
Improvements in direct response advertising, hefty layoffs and an improving economic outlook have helped make analysts more optimistic in recent months, but analysts agree a healthy Snap needs a wider user base. Its longevity hinges upon continuing to attract more users, especially older ones, but it remains to be seen whether a simpler app design will achieve that.
“There’s definitely room for an app like Snap to reach beyond its younger user base,” said Colin Campell, a marketing professor at the University of San Diego. “Facebook’s success with older adults shows how universal the need to connect has become. The main challenge for Snap, though, is its interface – it’s not very intuitive for older users, and a lot of the filters don’t really resonate with them either.”
A Pew Research study from late last year found that 29% of U.S. teens use the app several times a day. More than 38% of Snapchaters are 18-to-24-year-olds, according to Statista, but people over 35 are far less likely to engage with the app.
The new redesign, dubbed Simple Snapchat, was announced at Snap’s Partner Summit in September. The app’s interface is getting pared down from five tabs to three. One tab will include private messages, friend’s stories and followed creators. The next tab will feature the app’s classic camera mode. The third will be a merger of Snap’s Spotlight feature – its answer to TikTok’s feed and Instagram’s Reels – and content from media brands.
Gen Z takes up a greater proportion of users on Snapchat than any other social app, according to a recent eMarketer study. The app has the industry’s smallest share of both Gen X and Baby Boomer users, at 9.2% and 3.3%, respectively.
For more than a year, American user growth for Snapchat has been stubbornly flat, stuck at 100 million users.
“It needs to resume user growth” said James Kelleher, director of research at Argus Research. “And then it needs to tie that in with growth in advertising revenue, steady advertising revenue growth, instead of here and there.”
If Snap can get older users, which tend to have higher incomes that can attract advertisers, then the company may be in a solid position to profit off of them.
We “have the opportunity to onboard Snapchatters above the age of 35 who are completely new to Snapchat,” Jacob Andreou, then senior vice president of growth at Snap, said on investor day in 2023.
Snapchatters over 35 outpaced overall users for growth in daily active use and time spent on the app, he said.
“We think they have a lock on under young demos, which, you know, as they age up, can monetize incredibly well over time,” said Brian Pitz, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets.
With its current five-tab design, the app can be hard for new users to learn. Evan Spiegel acknowledged as much in an earnings call in 2017, when he said their team has indeed heard that “Snapchat is difficult to understand or hard to use.” Analysts are in agreement that the redesign is a positive move.
“I think that simplification should help to funnel users to the most attractive content faster and make it a little less confusing for newer folks that come onto the platform,” Pitz said.
Even younger Snapchatters have complaints about extra bells and whistles on the app.
Jamie Vinson, 28, is one of Snapchat’s faithful American users. Vinson has been a dedicated user for over a decade. Some of her friends have left the app, she said, but she appreciates the memories her account holds.
Vinson said she uses the app pretty much every day to chat with friends, but would prefer the app pushed endless content scrolling features less.
“I would take away the brain rotting story pages and keep it solely for communication,” Vinson said.
An overhaul could be costly. An October report on the digital advertising space by Barclays said the user experience change-up could disrupt user behavior or ad effectiveness in the short term, hurting revenue.
The last major redesign in 2018 received backlash from users for the addition of content-filled features that drew attention away from peer-to-peer chats. In a mirror of the present day, Snap hopes the 2018 changes would pull in older users.
“Additionally, we believe that the redesign has also made our application simpler and easier to use, especially for older users,” Spiegel said in a 2017 earnings call, referencing early metrics that content consumption and time spent on the app increased in the over 35 groups.
That did not prove to be the case. Between January and October of 2018, Snap’s stock price declined by 65%. Online petitions and a wave of negative reviews plagued the company as it meekly tried to pull back some of the changes that reportedly made the app even more cumbersome to navigate.
“Redesigns are always risky, and Snap’s 2018 overhaul is a lesson in how quickly things can go south,” Campbell said.
No matter what, analysts anticipate some kind of sudden drop in performance in the event of the app update, however temporary.