- Tweet: 21 February 2018
- Market cap lost: $1.3 billion
- Petition: Over 1.2 million signatures
Snap Inc. announced a Snapchat redesign in November 2017 and rolled it out in January 2018. The redesign separated users' friends from brands, celebrities and influencers, moving friends' stories to a different section. By February, a Change.org petition titled 'Remove the new Snapchat Update' had gathered over 1.2 million signatures. On Wednesday 21 February 2018, Kylie Jenner, who had 24.5 million Twitter followers at the time, tweeted about the app.
Her first tweet read: "sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me... ugh this is so sad." She followed it with a second tweet the same day. The next day, Thursday 22 February 2018, Snap stock closed down 6.1 percent. The company lost $1.3 billion in market capitalisation.
The redesign was defensible on paper. Separating the personal from the commercial is sound information architecture. The problem was that it changed where a very large number of people looked for the thing they opened the app to see. The petition had already passed a million signatures before the tweet landed. Jenner did not create the sentiment. She put a number on something already true, in front of a market that had not been pricing it.
A petition with over 1.2 million signatures did not move the stock. One tweet, from one person, did.
The Takeaway
A redesign that makes sense on an architecture diagram can still be catastrophically wrong if it moves the thing people came for. Watch the behaviour, not the rationale. The petition was public and enormous well before the market reacted, which means the information was available to anyone watching users rather than analysts. The signal was there. Most people were looking somewhere else. For more disasters where the warning signs were visible to anyone paying attention, see more Stackery Quackery.