Brief summary of Snapchat this year:

Just this year alone, Snapchat went through a whirlwind of events. Starting off with a new feature called “Our Story” in February which allowed users to group stories together to share with their audience. Then in April, Snap Inc. went public. Initially it’s IPO seemed like a success in the first 24 hours. Then the prices continued to fall, followed by a continuous battle with Facebook as it replicated it’s “story” feature on not only on the Facebook app, but also on Instagram and Whatsapp. Then in June, Snap acquired a social mapping startup “Zenly” for roughly in the $250 million to $350 million dollar range according to TechCrunch. Using Zenly’s platform, Snapchat debuted a feature called “Snap Map”, it allows users to use a map to view stories in specific areas of the world. Even with these new features, Snap appears to be struggling as it’s shares are hovering lower than it’s IPO pricing.

My Experience

Personally I am not a heavy Snapchat user. I don’t snap too much (I don’t know what the average is but I snapped 2–3 times a day) but I do look at majority of the stories that are posted. However when Snapchat releases their updates, I get excited. Being a user experience/product designer, it is always interesting to find out new features and its purpose. When “Our Story” rolled out, I was intrigued. It was a feature that I had envisioned before, however I never really got around to use it. When “Snap Map” rolled out, I originally saw it on the web first and thought it was a cool concept. But then I forgot about it. I remember Snapchat sending me a messaging debuting the feature but I skipped it over. It was probably at a time where I was uninterested. I figured that I could play around with it later when it shows up but there wasn’t even a button for that feature. I forgot that feature existed until a friend showed it to me his phone by pinching the screen while on the camera mode. At first I thought it was interesting but was also very confused at the same time. I asked the question why couldn’t you swipe to access that feature like the others on Snapchat. Regardless when I checked out the feature, it was amazing! The fact that I could click on a part of the map and view what is going on was an extremely powerful experience. That was a wow factor for me for sure. Even with that, it bothered me why such feature was hidden. It seemed like the only way to find out that feature ever existed was if you watched that message that Snapchat sent you, maybe if you read it on the web, or by word of mouth. Personally what got to me was pinching the screen. My experience with Snapchat has always been with one hand, swiping left, right, up, and down. Pinching the screen on Snapchat to access a feature was extremely unnatural to me.

With the previous experience in mind, I decided to build something that might be a little more user friendly.

“Our Story” Feature

Here’s how I would recreate the feature:

Rename “Our Story”: I would rename the feature from “Our Story” to “Shared Story”. This gives a better explanation on what the feature does. “Shared” gives the idea that it’s collaborative that may seem more engaging to some users. Also “Our Story” and “My Story” seems to similar visually.

Redesigning the “Stories” interface: “Shared Story” will be visible at all times. Users may be more inclined to use it and will seem no different then the original view.

Shared Story Feature

Explanation: With “Shared Story” users can combine stories with their friends. For example, say you’re at a concert with your friends and instead of having the same exact story as those who you went with, you can combine them. This provides a collective memory that you can save just like any other story, but gives your audience a new viewing experience and perspective by capturing moments at different angles and times. This also allows users to add friends who are mutual friends!