

Show friend profile photos on the Camera instead to attract to the Stories screen with one tap to quickly view their Story. Provide more thumbnails to help give some idea of what the Story is about.Ĭompelling content is missed. There isn’t enough information to decide which Stories to view. Increase the number of preview thumbnails on the Stories list

The opportunity here is to see if this would substantially improve the core flow of how people watch Stories. If a Story isn’t done yet, let the user swipe right to left to skip to the next person’s Story. Let the user just keep tapping and automatically open the next Story. When you’re done with viewing one Story, you have to go find another Story to tap to view. Or, consider a button for each of taking a photo or starting to record video.Ĭreate easy ways to keep watching Stories without picking the next person There are many reasons to not do this, but more default video may be a long-term necessity for someone. So require long-press to take a photo, and one tap starts recording video with another tap to stop. Some people may not want to press and hold to record video. I think eventually the default is going to be video first because people want videos to see more of what’s happening and mobile bandwidth increases. Simplify recording video by default with one tap So the question is, how close is Snapchat to the product that people in the future will use to share their lived experience, and what does Snapchat need to do to get there and adapt over time? In the future, I think people will want easy ways to share their lived experiences - meaning a close representation of the activities and feelings of what’s actually happening - increasingly with video then virtual reality and more. The opportunity for Snapchat is to enable each person to share a bunch of clips that become a daily video summary for each person - in Snapchat, that’s the “Stories” product so far.

Fullscreen means there’s no need to scroll, so the person can focus on media and whether to watch or skip, rather than trying to get the media to fit the screen with the right gestures. Perhaps the more important metric is about time spent watching.įullscreen, by default, helps people see and consume more videos, and Snapchat has that. But that’s a number of actions reportedly counted including videos shown from 0 seconds, and that number is out of date because the amount of videos shared and watched on mobile continues to increase rapidly and Snapchat is still growing fast. Snapchat’s engagement measured by video views grew massively in 2015, from 2 billion daily views in May 2015 to 7 billion daily views recently. Will Snapchat go for over 1 billion actives, and/or will the range of opportunities inside one app require focusing on a particular opportunity set?īelow are 21 ways that Snapchat can try to answer questions about engagement, growth and commerce. I don’t know what constraints and/or priorities are relevant for Snapchat’s product, and of course Snapchat has the details and data that are crucial to understanding what’s happening and deciding what to do. The chat portion of Snapchat is inherently harder to use than other chat apps because notifications don’t show text content, and text chatting requires an extra swipe since the app defaults to the camera.

A reason is that messaging has become used by more people than social feeds and because messaging can help enable a range of different activities including applications and commerce. However, messaging is arguably the core of the social experience now and even more so going forward.
Snapchat story a day in space free#
It creates a space where you feel free to share your day with less judgment since there aren’t “likes” visible to friends on each post.īut you do know who chooses to view your Snapchat Stories, so there’s feedback and a sense of intimacy that inspires more sharing and a lot of sharing videos. Snapchat is uniquely positioned as “default delete” - meaning that all posts eventually are deleted after viewing or after 24 hours, whereas other popular social services by default make your posts available indefinitely. But there’s more to be done and questions to be answered.Įven Twitter’s massive growth excitement for years was characterized by the challenge of finding mass sustained appeal - “Why say what I had for lunch?” Now, Snapchat’s massive growth with millions of passionate users is characterized by some persistent user misunderstanding of Snapchat use cases - some ask, “Why show something I did if it gets deleted?” And there are unexplored adaptations to broaden the appeal of Snapchat Stories and strengthen chat. Snapchat could be used by over 1 billion daily active users in time and substantially accelerate how many videos and photos people share and consume. According to its cofounder and CEO Snapchat is mainly “a camera company”.
