How poor UX affects business for Snapchat.

Amish Gadhia
Bootcamp
Published in
4 min readJul 14, 2022

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Cover image for the article

Recently Snapchat rolled out a new feature called “snapchat+” which will enable users to pay a monthly fee in order to gain access to exclusive in-app features.

Existing users can discover this new feature when they open their profile on Snapchat. I personally found it very interesting so I opened it to know what are those exclusive features.

Screenshot of Snapchat’s profile section
Snapchat’s profile section

It lands me on Snapchat's plans screen where all the plans are shown very neatly without any distractions. All the plans are highlighted and a clear CTA was given with “start 7-day free trial”. The 12 months plan is also preselected. All the plans are fairly reasonable in terms of the prices. The first impression was very good and I am really excited to know further details.

But what I realized there is no information regarding any of the exclusive features which they will offer when the user purchases a plan.

Screenshot of Snapchat plus membership plans
Snapchat plus membership plans

Here are the questions which came into my mind as a user.

  • what will I receive as a user when I buy a plan?
  • What are the rewards and services I will get if I pay for a plan?
  • Why should I pay for nothing?

It kinda gave me the feeling that I should not pay for these. It feels like, Snapchat created this only to get money from the users and not to provide any services.

There would be many users like me who might be hesitant to purchase a plan because of not providing much information regarding new features. Moreover why users should pay if they are not getting rewards for their purchase.

When I tap on to learn more I found the following screen.

Screenshot of Snapchat membership webpage
Snapchat plus membership webpage

It educates about what Snapchat+ is and what are its exclusive features. But why they are not showing features on the plans page. Why do users need to click on learn more in order to know the features? In an ideal scenario, the users should know what they are getting when they purchase a plan.

It might engage more users to purchase a plan if they show these features on the plans page. Not showing features on the plans page might lose some money from many of the users and it will surely affect their business from the subscription plan.

There is no end here, what I found next is very unethical. There is a couple of lines that are written in a very small font size above the CTA. It may be not even accessible to many of the users. Here is what it states.

“ FEATURES CAN CHANGE AT ANY TIME”

Screenshot of Snapchat membership terms and conditions
Snapchat plus membership terms and conditions

Why should they are rolling out new features if they are not sure about fulfilling the commitments? It is not a good approach to release a new feature where they change/remove the features for which the users have already paid!

The way Snapchat releases this new feature might deteriorate brand loyalty and transparency. It might result in losing some customers and the business because of poor UX.

Instead of this, Snapchat could list all the features and rewards on the plans screen only. It will give surety to users that they are not cheated and they are getting services for their purchases.

Conclusion and learnings

This helps us to get aware of how small wrong UX design decisions might end up losing customers and business for the organization. We should always keep the business perspective in our mind when we are making any design decision.

As a designer, we should design UI in such a way that it is engaging and satisfying for the customers as well as helps to grow the organization’s business.

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it! Be sure to 👏🏽 clap below and leave your comments and suggestions. If you have any feedback or want to chat with me, drop me a message at gadhiaamish@gmail.com or connect on LinkedIn.

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