Snapchat Has Started Rolling Back Its Wildly Unpopular Redesign Changes

Snapchat’s newest look is reversing the most unpopular aspects of its infamous redesign from earlier this year.

According to a new report from The Verge, Snapchat started to roll out its second redesign in six months to iPhone users late on Thursday. It’s hoping to win back the people it alienated with an overhaul introduced earlier this year.

In the new design, snaps and chats are aligned chronologically and Stories from friends have been moved back to the right-hand side of the camera screen. Snapchat has also added a separate Subscriptions feature to keep Stories from popular creators and publishers in the loop while letting the other Stories be separated.

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel had first mentioned these design changes on the company’s recent earnings call, where he framed the changes not as a roll-back but as an optimization of the redesign.

“We learned that combining watching Stories and communicating with friends into the same place made it harder to optimize for both competing behaviors,” he said. “The redesign created a lot of new opportunities, and we look forward to continuing our efforts to refine and improve Snapchat.”

“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 changes we have made around separating friends from creators and sorting friends’ Stories by relationships,” Spiegel continues.

Snapchat’s original redesign, which it first revealed back in November, was an unmitigated disaster for the company and was even partially blamed for its poor financial results last week. It’s rare for companies to row back on redesigns, but Snapchat succumbed to pressure after over a million users signed a petition.