Snapchat Getting Makeover As User Growth Stalls

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MIAMI (CBSMiami/CNN Money) -- Snapchat is getting a new look.

Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, said Tuesday that it is planning to redesign the messaging application to make it easier to use after facing several consecutive quarters of anemic user growth.

"One thing that we have heard over the years is that Snapchat is difficult to understand or hard to use, and our team has been working on responding to this feedback," Evan Spiegel, Snap's CEO, said in prepared remarks for an earnings call Tuesday.

Spiegel added that the redesign could be "disruptive" to Snap's business in the short term.

"We don't yet know how the behavior of our community will change when they begin to use our updated application," he said.

Related: Snapchat adds features as rivalry with Instagram intensifies

The announcement came after yet another disappointing quarter for the newly public company.

Snapchat added just 4.5 million new daily active users in the third quarter, bringing its total audience to 178 million daily users. Instagram Stories, a Snapchat knockoff product, recently hit 300 million daily users.

The company's losses more than tripled from the previous year to $443 million in the third quarter, while its sales fell well short of Wall Street estimates.

Even Snap's first foray into hardware appears to be a failure. The company took a nearly $40 million write-down for excess inventory of Spectacles, its smart glasses.

Snap stock plunged as much as 20% in after-hours trading Tuesday following the earnings report.

(©2017 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. CNN contributed to this report.)