Snapchat

*This a conceptual feature for an academic project

Role

UX Designer

Product

A new feature to an existing product

Tools

Figma, Figjam, Mockfy, Zoom and Snapchat

Time

4 Weeks

- Context

Background

Snapchat is a multimedia instant messaging app and service. One of the principal features of Snapchat is that pictures and messages are usually only available for a short time before they become inaccessible to their recipients. The app has evolved from originally focusing on person-to-person photo sharing to presently featuring users' "Stories" of 24 hours of chronological content. It has also reportedly incorporated limited use of end-to-end encryption, with plans to broaden its use in the future.

Problem

Snapchat has lost millions of users, likely due to the sudden and drastic redesign of the app as well as its biggest competitor copying core features. Meta has copied many of snapchats key features such as “stories” making Instagram stories much more popular than snapchats. With Meta copying and fore fronting most of snapchats core features there has been a significant decline in daily snapchat users.

Solution

Introduce a “Live” feature to snapchat to compete with Instagram's live feature. Incorporating this feature should increase daily snapchat users and user retention additionally keeping the changes to the current interface minimal to ensure a good user experience.

- Research

Understand why users enjoy watching live or going live on other platforms.
Understand how to enhance the current “live” experience from the point of view of a watcher and streamer

Research Objectives

Interviews

I kicked off my research with some user interviews mostly on zoom and a handful on facetime. I interviewed watchers and streamers to gain some understanding of why they watch other people go live or go live themselves. Really to understand the overall appeal from every point of view.

Then I wanted to understand some of the participants' pain points and complaints so I could use what the user finds familiar as a base for my definition and ideation phases in the future and improve upon that.

Insights

I made my affinity map and grouped a few common themes and from there I was able to gain some insights.

Most participants don’t watch for longer than a few minutes
All participants would like some form of control over the comments from both perspectives
Most participants watching would stay longer if they could engage with streamers
None of the participants enjoyed the hearts/likes flooding the screen and found them pointless.
Privacy in some aspects were wanted

Competitive Analysis

After conducting my interviews, I went to compare some competitors using my participants' pain points and insights to navigate my analysis.

Instagram is Snapchat's largest and unarguably most direct competitor and was a key element in my overall research given that Snapchat’s key and most distinct feature was copied by Instagram when Meta was unable to buy it from the founder.

- Define

Persona

Meet Bella Underwood or as her small base of followers know her “Bella the Baker '' Bella loves to bake and started posting her delicious pastries and desserts on her snapchat consisting mostly of friends and a few family members. Bella loves to engage with her small and supportive audience and get feedback from them from time to time when she goes live on other platforms.

However, she notices that she doesn’t maintain a lot of viewers after a certain amount of time and she herself sometimes forgets she is in front of an audience with the lack of engagement on her side other than speaking.

HMWs

We’ve reached one of my favorite parts in the entire design process. How Might We…

So, how might we essentially solve the users' problems? Looking back at the research I’ve done here is what I’ve decided to do-

Introduce comment settings to live.
Got rid of the likes and hearts
Allow users to go live to a specific audience of their choosing
Introduce a poll feature for the host that allows viewers to vote on a question the host asks

Flows

I mapped out three flows, since the ui didn’t change drastically it should feel familiar to the user and hopefully easy enough to navigate.

- Ideate

Low-Fidelity Wireframes

Like always the first steps of ideation begin with terrible hand drawn wireframes on my Ipad with handwriting that no one can read but myself simply because I’m writing so fast.

I realized that the bar on the side would have to change for the host while they go live to accommodate different features such as the comment settings and the poll feature.

Mid-Fidelity Wireframes

I started working on the first couple of screens to figure out how I would seamlessly incorporate this into the existing UI to keep everything familiar to the user.

The mid fidelity wireframes were next and the most enjoyable part of this case study I enjoyed mimicking snapchats UI

- Testing

Usability Test

I decided to test on the mid fidelity designs this time around, I did this to ensure that participants focus on the familiarity, organization and navigation of the site itself. This was important since having minimal changes to the UI was necessary.

Success!

Familiar and easy to understand
Straightforward and simple to use

Suggestions

Make the test harder?

Failures

Some participants didn’t finish the test.

- Grand Finale

To further enrich the streaming experience, I introduced a poll feature specifically designed for streamers as well as comment settings for viewers. Viewers are able to change the rate of speed at which comments appear or disable them all together.

The minimal changes to the interface were intentional to ensure a smooth transition for existing Snapchat users. By leveraging familiar design patterns and integrating the "Live" feature seamlessly into the existing interface.

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