If you are in product development, the lesson is that any change has a cost and impact to your users, so you need to make sure that the benefits outweigh the cost and plan for resistance.

That's entirely different from "they will complain no mater what you do so you should ignore them".

Is there any indication that hadn't happened here? Is Snap really that stupid? Did they not test this at all? If so, that's the big story.

Unspecified numbers of users complaining isn't a terribly sufficient story. I recall lots of facebook "boycotts" over the years ago over various UI changes, totally forgotten after a day or two. I suspect they actually a/b tested each change in small markets or test audiences and found usage increased after people got used to it. If Snap isn't doing that then that should be big news.

Another option that product development ought to consider is choice.

Determine the ongoing cost of maintaining two different user interfaces versus the benefit of permitting users to choose their preferred interface.

If properly engineered, with low impedance mismatch between API and UI, the cost could be kept reasonably low for most applications.

So much this.

I don't think you should be given free reign to just accept outrage because that's the way you think things need to be.

You ultimately need to continually make improvements, not change for change sake.

That's a non-sequitur if I've ever seen one. A non-negligible portion of users are conservative in their tastes for UI change... therefore ignore a non-negligible portion of your users.

That attitude is exactly what's wrong with the tech world today.

It's more subtle than that.

A significant number of people will complain at first even if the change doesn't hurt them. People just like the familiar - but then, they also eventually get bored with it! So damned if you do, damned if you don't...

So the takeaway isn't "ignore them" it's "listen closely enough to be able to tell 'is this just a reflex or did I unintentionally hamper their use of the app in a way I didn't anticipate?'" Can they still get their stuff done easily, once they get accustomed to the new way, or are there things we actually made unnecessarily worse?

>> It was a major change, and many power users (people managing multiple accounts or brand accounts) pointed out that it made their work a lot harder and more prone to error.

> hard to take any particular moment of outrage too seriously.

Apparently 'outrage' is when dedicated users mention their work was made more difficult and prone to error.

The HN community can listen to customer feedback better than this.

Yes, this is very true. Can anyone name an update or design of software that was applauded by the majority of users? I can't.

Windows '95 over Windows 3.11

Mac OS X Tiger over Mac OS X Panther

Windows 7 over Windows Vista

Until about Snow Leopard pretty much every Mac OS X update was almost universally considered much better than the ones before (though the truism that you avoid a new Mac OS X update on a primary computer till 10.x.1 still held).