Snapchat Attempts to Fix Controversial Redesign by Moving Stories from Friends to Discover

As the adverse impact of its 2017 redesign can clearly be seen from the latest earnings report, Snapchat is now taking a reversal step and will be moving Stories from friends back to the right side of the app where media content from third-party publishers and celebrities already exists. The latest move comes at the cost of slower user growth that is evident from the addition of just two percent of new daily active users in the first quarter of 2018, a drop from the five percent increase in the last quarter.

Acknowledging the negativity through the redesign that separated social from media by bringing chats and stories from friends on the left side of the Snapchat app and moving the content from publishers and celebrities and Snap-curated stories on the right side, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said, "[A] change this big to existing behaviour comes with some disruption, especially given the high frequency of daily engagement of our community." Thus, Snapchat is tweaking the original redesign, which Spiegel considered as an "optimisation".

"We learned that combining watching Stories and communicating with friends into the same place made it harder to optimise for both competing behaviours," Spiegel said during the company's earnings call. "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 3 changes we have made around separating friends from creators and sorting friends' Stories by relationships," he added.

Snapchat will have new version of the Discover screen that includes preview tiles of Stories from friends on top, sorted by who you interact with most. After the Friends section, there is the Subscriptions section that includes all the stories from publishers and celebrities.

Notably, this isn't the first time when Snapchat has decided to rework on its redesign. The app previously attempted to fix the cluttered experience by creating separate tabs for Chat and chronologically ordered Stories within the Friends section. But the results weren't positive of the past developments as Snapchat end up hosting 191 million daily active users - far less than 450 million daily users on Facebook-owned Stories.