Disruptive Innovations And Tone Deaf Redesigns

Sometimes a product requires a new look or feature. Sometimes the change is seen as a disruptive innovation and people love it. Sometimes it’s seen as a tone deaf redesign that inspire people to write petitions agains the change. This week we look into the latest changes from Snapchat and talk about it in the context of other changes like the Facebook timeline, Digg v4 and and iOS change. The show notes are below.

Disruptive Show Notes

People are complaining about the Snapchat redesign, but their stock spiked, Matthew Lynley, TechCrunch Why Users Hate It, Ingrid Angulo, CBS Why The Snapchat Redesign Is A Good Idea, Todd Spangler, Variety

Barnes & Nobles Fires Many Employees To Save Money, John Biggs, TechCrunch

Apple’s Software “Problem” and “Fixing” It (via twitter) by Steven Sinofsky, Learning By Shipping

• 27/ I can’t prove this but I’ve also worked on some really big projects where people said the same thing and we had tons of data. Apple has the same data. What is different is that at scale a bug that happens to 0.01% of people is a lot of people. A stadium full or more.
• 29/ The more a product is used the more hyper-sensitive people get to how it works. The human brain is extraordinary in how it recognizes even the slightest changes in responsiveness, performance, and sequencing of operations.
• 30/ It’s incredible how even smallest changes can become disorienting. We used to say how this is rooted in primordial instincts for survival — the ability to spot a tiger in the grass that might jump out to eat us. Same ability to detect small change drives us nuts on computers.
• 43/ Growth hacking or “move fast break things” sounded great until it wasn’t. This especially doesn’t/never worked in enterprise. Again, adopting a methodology absent building a great product *always* fails. “Internet time” was kind of a bust the first time around.