I’m a regular Snapchat user, I use it to keep in touch with my friends around the world. I think the principle works great, the self-destructing nature of the snaps allows us to take silly shots to our hearts content, without having to worry about them cluttering our phones.
One thing I still have reservations about, is its interface, its interaction pattern, or the seemingly lack-of. Perhaps I’m getting old, I can debate for ages on how I question the pattern of swiping in all directions to go to different parts of the app, or it took me weeks to work out how to exit out of a news article. But what I find more intriguing is that, it’s true that I dislike the interface, what keeps me going back?
How an app that that hasn’t been the best experience for me and possibly, for others, did not let this hinder the product’s phenomenal growth? Seeing Snapchat’s success, what should we consider in our design process to allow innovation to thrive and solving experience problems equally?
Product direction
As a designer, it’s beneficial to speak to our product managers on where do we see the product is heading. Do we see more innovation in the future, or we have a problem that we need to solve first?
Snapchat is about fun experiences, their facial recognition filters excels in the domain of social media apps. Its interface might not be intuitive to everyone. But if the objective is to create something fun and out of the box, then the goal is achieved.
Its exciting to design something that inspire user to discover new interactions, new way to do things. The swipe phenomenon from Tinder is a good example. However at the same time it is important that we ask ourselves constantly ”why”, and ”is the new way a better way” — does the current experience quench the thirst of our users, is it ok to reuse what we have, rather than creating new elements for the sake of it?
Demographic
Snapchats success is built upon its demographics openness to new interaction patterns. To their younger users, the priority is to share fun experience with their friends. Additionally being keen learners than other demographic, they’re more likely to learn a new interaction to archive their goals, instead of dismissing the whole thing as a bad experience.
By contrast, for the demographic that is more resilient to change, it would be better to start on helping them to get to what they need. A better way to introduce change would be in smaller bits, in order to maintain the familiarity.
It will always be beneficial to take a more holistic approach in the design process. By understanding the needs from our product team as well as our customers, it can help us choose better on what we need to solve, and hopefully we can nurture both innovation and great experience at the same time.
