Product Decisions That Backfired: How Snapchat, Windows 8, Digg, Google+, and Others Alienated Their Users Through Misguided Design Changes
In September 2018, Snapchat completed a controversial redesign that separated content from friends and content from publishers into two distinct sections of the app. The response was immediate and devastating. Within days, a Change.org petition titled "Remove the New Snapchat Update" had gathered over 1.2 million signatures. Kylie Jenner tweeted "sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me... ugh this is so sad," and Snap's stock dropped 6 percent in a single day--wiping approximately $1.3 billion from the company's market capitalization on the basis of a single celebrity tweet about a product decision.
The Snapchat redesign is one of many cases in which product decisions made by intelligent, experienced teams produced results that were not merely disappointing but actively destructive--driving away users, destroying value, and sometimes killing the product entirely. These failures are instructive not because they reveal incompetence but because they reveal systematic patterns in how product decisions go wrong: patterns that repeat across companies, industries, and decades.
Understanding these patterns is valuable for product managers, designers, engineers, and anyone involved in making decisions about products that people use. The mistakes are predictable, which means they are, at least in theory, avoidable.
Snapchat's Redesign Disaster
What Was Snapchat's Redesign Disaster
Snapchat's 2018 redesign was motivated by a legitimate business problem: the app was widely perceived as confusing and difficult to use, which limited its appeal to demographics beyond its core audience of teenagers and young adults. CEO Evan Spiegel believed that simplifying the interface would make the app more accessible to a broader audience and more attractive to advertisers.
The redesign separated the app into three main sections: a camera screen in the center (unchanged), a Friends page on the left (containing Stories and messages from friends), and a Discover page on the right (containing content from publishers and creators). The logic was that users would appreciate the clear separation between personal content and professional/publisher content.
Radical redesign ignored user feedback. The redesign was developed largely without extensive user testing or beta rollout. When early feedback from users was negative, Snapchat pushed forward with the launch rather than iterating based on user responses. The company treated the redesign as a strategic decision rather than a user experience hypothesis to be tested and refined.
Confused core users. Snapchat's core users had developed deep familiarity with the previous interface. The redesign moved features, changed navigation patterns, and reorganized content in ways that disrupted established habits. Users who had spent years learning the (admittedly unintuitive) interface suddenly found that their learned behaviors no longer worked. The cognitive cost of relearning the app was high, and many users responded by using the app less rather than investing in learning the new interface.
Caused backlash and massive petition. The 1.2 million-signature petition was unprecedented for a product redesign. The intensity of user anger revealed something that Snapchat's leadership had underestimated: users' relationship with a product is not purely functional. It is emotional, habitual, and identity-linked. Changing the product felt to users not like an improvement but like a violation--a unilateral decision that disregarded their preferences, disrupted their routines, and altered a tool they had integrated into their social lives.
Financial impact. Snap reported its first-ever decline in daily active users in the quarter following the redesign, losing approximately 3 million daily users. The stock, which had been trading around $17 before the redesign, fell below $6 by the end of 2018. While multiple factors contributed to the stock decline, the redesign was widely identified as a significant cause of user loss and investor concern.
Snapchat eventually reversed many elements of the redesign, but the damage to user trust, engagement metrics, and market confidence was not easily repaired. The episode demonstrated that product decisions are not merely technical decisions about interface design; they are relationship decisions that affect users' trust, habits, and emotional connection to the product.
Windows 8: Forcing a Touch Interface on Desktop Users
Why Did Windows 8 Fail
In October 2012, Microsoft launched Windows 8, a radical departure from every previous version of Windows. The most dramatic change was the replacement of the traditional desktop interface--with its Start menu, taskbar, and overlapping windows--with a full-screen, tile-based interface called "Metro" (later renamed "Modern UI"), designed primarily for touch-screen devices.
Forced touch-first interface on desktop users. Windows 8's design reflected Microsoft's strategic anxiety about the rise of tablets and smartphones. The iPad, launched in 2010, had quickly established a new computing category. Microsoft feared being left behind in mobile computing and decided to unify its desktop and mobile interfaces into a single design language.
The problem was that the vast majority of Windows users did not have touch screens. They were using desktop computers and laptops with keyboards and mice--input devices for which the tile-based, gesture-heavy Metro interface was awkward and unintuitive. Swiping from screen edges, navigating full-screen apps, and managing the split between Metro and the traditional desktop were confusing with a mouse and frustrating without touch.
Removed the Start button. The most controversial decision was the removal of the Start button, a fixture of the Windows interface since Windows 95. For nearly two decades, every Windows user had learned to click the Start button in the lower-left corner to access programs, settings, and system functions. Windows 8 replaced this with a hidden "hot corner" that required moving the mouse to an invisible target area--a gesture that was natural on a touch screen but invisible and unintuitive with a mouse.
The removal of the Start button generated an enormous backlash. Third-party Start button replacement apps became some of the most popular downloads for Windows 8 users, effectively demonstrating that Microsoft's design decision was rejected by its user base.
Ignored how existing users actually worked. Windows 8's fundamental error was designing for a hypothetical future user (touch-screen tablet user) rather than the actual current user (keyboard-and-mouse desktop user). The existing Windows user base numbered over a billion people, all of whom had years or decades of learned behavior with the traditional Windows interface. The redesign asked all of these users to abandon their learned behaviors simultaneously, without a compelling reason to do so--since most of them did not own touch-screen devices.
Microsoft reversed course with Windows 10, which restored the Start menu, de-emphasized the tile-based interface, and provided a user experience that was recognizable to long-time Windows users while still supporting touch screens. The Windows 8 era is widely regarded within Microsoft as a cautionary example of allowing strategic anxiety to override user-centered design.
Digg v4: Destroying a Community Overnight
What Happened with Digg v4
Digg was one of the most popular social news aggregation platforms of the mid-2000s, with tens of millions of monthly visitors at its peak. Users submitted links to articles, videos, and content from across the internet, and the community voted content up ("digging" it) or down ("burying" it). The most popular content rose to the front page, creating a community-curated news experience.
In August 2010, Digg launched version 4 (Digg v4), a complete redesign that fundamentally altered the platform's character and functionality:
Complete redesign favoring publishers over community. Digg v4 gave media publishers the ability to post content directly to the platform, with that content appearing prominently in users' feeds. Previously, content on Digg was submitted and curated entirely by the community. The publisher integration meant that corporate content competed with (and often displaced) community-submitted content.
Removed features users loved. The redesign eliminated several features that were core to the Digg community experience: the ability to bury (downvote) content, the ability to view the most popular upcoming stories, user profiles with submission histories, and the community's ability to organize around shared interests. These features were not just functional tools; they were the social infrastructure that made Digg a community rather than merely a content platform.
Mass exodus to Reddit within days. The backlash was immediate and devastating. Within days of the v4 launch, a coordinated "Digg exodus" directed users to Reddit, Digg's smaller competitor. The Reddit community actively welcomed Digg refugees, and the migration became self-reinforcing: as users left Digg for Reddit, the remaining users had fewer reasons to stay, driving further migration.
Digg's traffic collapsed. The site that had been valued at over $200 million was eventually sold in 2012 for approximately $500,000--a 99.75 percent decline in value. The Digg v4 failure is one of the most dramatic examples of a product decision destroying a company, and it holds several lessons:
Disregarding community culture is fatal for community platforms. Digg was not a content platform; it was a community. The community had its own culture, norms, rituals, and social structure. The redesign treated Digg as a content platform that could be reorganized at will, ignoring the fact that the community's investment in the platform's social structure was the source of its value. When the social structure was destroyed, the community left.
You cannot force users to adopt a new product identity. Digg's community identity was built around user-powered content curation--the idea that the community, not corporations, decided what was important. The publisher integration changed Digg's identity from a community platform to a corporate content platform. Users who had invested in the community identity rejected the new identity and found a platform (Reddit) that preserved the values they cared about.
Google+: Treating Social as a Feature, Not a Culture
Why Did Google+ Fail
Google launched Google+ in June 2011 as its attempt to challenge Facebook's dominance in social networking. The platform had sophisticated features--Circles for organizing contacts into groups, Hangouts for video chat, and a clean, Google-esque interface. Google brought enormous resources to the effort: engineering talent, infrastructure, distribution through its existing products, and corporate commitment at the highest levels (CEO Larry Page made Google+ a company priority and tied employee bonuses to its success).
Despite these advantages, Google+ never achieved meaningful user engagement and was officially shut down in 2019.
Forced adoption through YouTube integration. Google's most controversial strategy was integrating Google+ with its other products, most prominently YouTube. Users who wanted to comment on YouTube videos were required to create a Google+ account, and YouTube comments were linked to Google+ profiles. This forced integration generated massive user backlash: a Change.org petition against the YouTube-Google+ integration gathered over 240,000 signatures, and the YouTube co-founder Javed Karim posted his first comment on the platform in eight years simply to write: "Why the f*** do I need a Google+ account to comment on a video?"
The forced integration increased Google+ sign-ups but not genuine engagement. Users created Google+ accounts because they were forced to, not because they wanted to use the platform. This produced impressive registration numbers (Google claimed 300 million "active users") but negligible actual social activity. The platform became known as a "ghost town"--technically populated but socially dead.
No clear value over Facebook. Google+ offered features (Circles, Hangouts) that were genuinely useful, but it did not offer a compelling reason for users to move their social lives from Facebook, where their friends, photos, memories, and social connections already existed. The switching cost was enormous--not because Google+ was technically inferior but because social networks are subject to network effects: a social network with all your friends on it is infinitely more valuable than a technically superior social network with none of your friends on it.
Treating social as a feature, not a cultural shift. Google approached social networking as a product engineering problem: build better features, leverage distribution, and users will come. But social networking is not primarily a technology product; it is a cultural practice. People do not choose social networks based on feature comparisons; they choose them based on where their friends are, what cultural moment the platform represents, and what social identity the platform enables them to express. Google's engineering-first approach failed to account for the cultural, social, and emotional dimensions of social networking that determine adoption.
Amazon Fire Phone: Engineering Gimmicks Over User Needs
What Was Amazon Fire Phone's Mistake
In June 2014, Amazon launched the Fire Phone, its first (and only) smartphone. The device's marquee feature was "Dynamic Perspective," a 3D display effect that used four front-facing cameras to track the user's face and create the illusion of depth in the user interface. Items on screen shifted in response to the user's head movements, creating a parallax effect.
Gimmicky 3D feature nobody wanted. Dynamic Perspective was technically impressive but practically useless. It consumed battery life, added complexity to the device, and provided no functional benefit to users. The feature felt like a technology demonstration--something that elicited "that's cool" on first viewing and "so what?" on second viewing. It did not help users accomplish anything they needed to accomplish with their phone.
Locked to AT&T. Amazon launched the Fire Phone exclusively with AT&T, limiting its potential market to AT&T subscribers. This exclusivity deal, common in the smartphone industry's early years, was increasingly anachronistic by 2014, when the smartphone market was mature and consumers expected carrier flexibility.
Focused on Amazon integration over user needs. The Fire Phone was designed primarily as an Amazon commerce device. Its most distinctive functional feature was Firefly, which could identify physical products by pointing the phone's camera at them and then offering to sell those products through Amazon. The phone's user interface was organized around Amazon content and services: Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Music, Amazon Appstore.
This Amazon-centric design served Amazon's business interests (driving commerce and Prime subscriptions) but did not serve users' interests (having a phone that was the best available tool for communication, productivity, and entertainment). The phone lacked access to Google Play Store, which meant it could not run the vast majority of popular Android apps. Without apps, the phone was functionally inferior to competing devices regardless of its other features.
Amazon ultimately wrote off approximately $170 million in unsold Fire Phone inventory and discontinued the product. The failure demonstrated that technical novelty (3D display) and corporate integration (Amazon ecosystem) are not substitutes for user value. Users choose phones based on what the phones allow them to do, not on what the phones allow the manufacturer to sell them.
Netflix Qwikster: A Brand Split That Customers Rejected
How Did Netflix Qwikster Backfire
In September 2011, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings announced that the company would split its DVD-by-mail service and its streaming service into two separate companies. The streaming service would remain Netflix; the DVD service would be rebranded as "Qwikster." Each service would have its own website, its own billing, and its own user account. Customers who wanted both services would need to manage two separate subscriptions.
The announcement came shortly after Netflix had raised prices by 60 percent for customers who subscribed to both DVD and streaming services--a change that had already generated significant customer anger.
Split streaming and DVD into separate services with price increase. The Qwikster announcement compounded the price increase anger with the inconvenience of managing two separate services. Customers who used both DVD and streaming would need to maintain two accounts, two queues, and two bills. Their unified movie experience would be fragmented into two disconnected services.
Customer anger forced reversal within a month. The backlash was swift and intense. Netflix lost approximately 800,000 subscribers in the quarter following the price increase and Qwikster announcement--the first subscriber decline in the company's history. The stock price dropped from approximately $300 to under $80. Hastings apologized and reversed the Qwikster decision within 23 days of the announcement.
The Qwikster failure illustrated several product decision principles:
Don't make customers' lives harder. The Qwikster split made the customer experience worse in every dimension: more accounts to manage, more passwords to remember, more bills to pay, more interfaces to learn. Whatever strategic logic motivated the split (separating a declining DVD business from a growing streaming business), the customer-facing impact was purely negative.
Don't compound bad news. The Qwikster announcement came in the immediate aftermath of the price increase, compounding customer anger rather than allowing it to dissipate. The timing demonstrated a failure of customer empathy: Netflix's leadership was focused on corporate strategy and did not adequately consider how the announcement would be received by customers already feeling betrayed by the price increase.
Respect existing user workflows. Netflix customers had built a workflow around a single platform: browsing content, adding items to a unified queue, receiving DVDs and streaming movies from the same account. The Qwikster split would have destroyed this workflow without providing any compensating benefit to the customer.
What Patterns Emerge in Product Failures?
Examining product decision failures across companies, industries, and decades reveals recurring patterns:
Ignoring User Feedback
The most common pattern is proceeding with a decision despite clear signals from users that the decision is unwelcome. Snapchat pushed forward with its redesign despite negative user testing feedback. Windows 8 shipped despite internal awareness that the Start button removal would be controversial. Google+ continued its forced YouTube integration despite massive user backlash.
Why it happens: Product teams develop conviction about their vision and interpret negative feedback as resistance to change rather than as valid data about user preferences. There is a legitimate tension here--users sometimes resist beneficial changes initially and grow to appreciate them over time--but the pattern of ignoring feedback is more often a sign of overconfidence than of visionary leadership.
Designing for Hypothetical Users, Not Actual Users
Windows 8 was designed for hypothetical touch-screen users rather than actual keyboard-and-mouse users. Google+ was designed for hypothetical social network switchers rather than actual Facebook users. Amazon Fire Phone was designed for hypothetical Amazon commerce enthusiasts rather than actual smartphone buyers.
Why it happens: Product teams are drawn to the excitement of imagining new user behaviors rather than the discipline of serving existing ones. Designing for hypothetical users allows unconstrained creativity; designing for actual users requires the less glamorous work of understanding and respecting existing behaviors, preferences, and workflows.
Adding Complexity Instead of Value
The Amazon Fire Phone added Dynamic Perspective (complexity without value). Digg v4 added publisher integration (complexity that undermined existing value). Many failed product decisions add features, options, or capabilities that increase the cognitive load of using the product without providing benefits that justify that load.
Why it happens: Product teams often equate novelty with value. A new feature feels like an improvement because it represents something new. But value to users is not determined by novelty; it is determined by whether the new feature helps users accomplish something they care about more effectively than they could before.
Changing Too Much Too Fast
Every failed redesign in this analysis involved changing too many things simultaneously. Snapchat redesigned its entire navigation structure at once. Digg v4 changed the content model, the interface, and the community structure simultaneously. Windows 8 changed the Start menu, the app model, the visual design, and the input paradigm simultaneously.
Why it happens: Product teams that have been developing a redesign for months or years see the changes as a coherent whole. But users experience the changes as simultaneous disruptions to multiple aspects of their learned behavior. The cumulative cognitive load of multiple simultaneous changes overwhelms users' ability to adapt, producing frustration and abandonment rather than gradual adaptation.
How Can Product Teams Avoid These Mistakes?
Listen to Users--But Understand What They're Telling You
Users are not always right about what they want, but they are almost always right about what they do not want. When a million users sign a petition against your redesign, they are telling you something important--not necessarily that the redesign is wrong in every detail, but that the redesign has violated something they value: a workflow, a social norm, a relationship with the product, or a sense of control over their experience.
Test Changes Incrementally
Rather than shipping comprehensive redesigns, test changes incrementally through A/B testing, gradual rollouts, and beta programs. Incremental testing allows you to identify which specific changes produce negative user responses and which are accepted or appreciated, rather than bundling all changes into a single release where the impact of individual changes cannot be isolated.
Understand Why Features Exist Before Removing Them
Before removing a feature, understand why it exists and what need it serves. The Digg team removed the bury button without understanding that the bury button was a core part of the community's self-governance mechanism. The Windows 8 team removed the Start button without understanding that it was the foundational navigation element for a billion users. Features that seem unnecessary from an engineering perspective may serve critical social, emotional, or habitual functions for users.
Respect Existing Workflows
Users build workflows around products--sequences of actions, mental models, muscle memories, and habits that allow them to accomplish their goals efficiently. Product changes that disrupt these workflows impose real costs on users: time to relearn, frustration during the transition, and risk of errors during the adjustment period. These costs must be weighed against the benefits of the change, and the benefits must be compelling enough to justify the disruption.
Separate Strategic Decisions from User Experience Decisions
Many product failures result from strategic decisions (compete with tablets, challenge Facebook, drive Amazon commerce) being implemented as user experience decisions without adequate consideration of how the strategy will be experienced by users. The strategic logic of Windows 8 (unify desktop and mobile) was reasonable; the user experience implementation (remove the Start button, force Metro on desktop users) was not. Product teams should evaluate strategic decisions through the lens of user impact, not just business logic.
Product decisions that backfire are rarely the result of stupidity or malice. They are the result of intelligent people making decisions based on incomplete models of user behavior--models that overweight strategic logic, technical novelty, and corporate objectives while underweighting user habits, emotional attachments, and the fundamental human resistance to imposed change. The antidote is not to avoid making product changes but to make them with humility, incrementalism, and genuine respect for the people who use the product.
References and Further Reading
Newton, C. (2018). "Snap's Redesign Cost It $1.3 Billion After Kylie Jenner Tweet." The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/22/17040996/snapchat-redesign-kylie-jenner-tweet
Foley, M.J. (2012). "Windows 8: The Bold Gamble." ZDNet. https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-8-the-bold-gamble/
Rose, K. (2011). "Digg's Redesign Fiasco." The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/
Gundotra, V. (2011). "Introducing Google+." Official Google Blog. https://googleblog.blogspot.com/
Stone, B. (2014). "Amazon Fire Phone: Betting Big on Jeff Bezos." Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/
Hastings, R. (2011). "An Explanation and Some Reflections." Netflix Blog. https://about.netflix.com/
Ries, E. (2011). The Lean Startup. Crown Business. https://theleanstartup.com/
Norman, D.A. (2013). The Design of Everyday Things. Revised ed. Basic Books. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things
Krug, S. (2014). Don't Make Me Think, Revisited. 3rd ed. New Riders. https://sensible.com/dont-make-me-think/
Christensen, C.M. (2003). The Innovator's Solution. Harvard Business Review Press. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=14760
Kim, W.C. & Mauborgne, R. (2005). Blue Ocean Strategy. Harvard Business Review Press. https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/
Cooper, A. (2004). The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. Sams Publishing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inmates_Are_Running_the_Asylum
Spool, J.M. (2011). "The $300 Million Button." User Interface Engineering. https://articles.uie.com/three_hund_million_button/