Initial Thoughts on Snapchat’s Spectacles

What works about the unexpected product from Snapchat

1. Incremental Adoption: the initial product won’t have any augmented reality capabilities, which seems like an unusual gap for a brand so closely associated with making AR part of the everyday. The benefits of leaving our AR functionality are twofold: reducing cost/complexity and making the technology less intimidating for the less tech savvy. Recording video is something we are all familiar with, home movies go back to- it doesn’t feel “new” or intimidating. It feels like a useful shortcut, enabling someone to capture quickstart-quickstop action much more easily than with a smartphone. It’s a move away from photos in their analog sense — preserving a memory for later, essentially an archival activity, towards images as a conversational tool. It’s in part a generational divide, one that Google didn’t quite seem to grasp with their Glass product. I would expect to see Snap roll out some level of AR functionality in future versions, assuming the initial video/photo only Spectacles products gains enough traction.
2. Design for social cues & behavior: by making the Snap Spectacles resemble over-the-top sunglasses it provides a behavioral cue that indoor use is inappropriate by default, mitigating some of the social tensions that naturally emerge when recording video within walls, which automatically feels like a more private space, with a commensurate increase in the expectation of privacy.
3. The “too much” aesthetic: like Snapchat’s notoriously confusing UI (at least for older users) part of their essential brand is to provide a huge palette of options for young digital natives even at the expense of accessibility for less mobile-tech savvy users. While they miss out on market share with older users, this is part of a larger strategy — preserving a youthful sense of cool (in the youth-obsessed U.S.) and betting that older users are too ossified in their social media usage to really get deeply involved with the relatively new, weird kid of social platforms that is Snapchat. The bold look of the glasses (and the fact they light up when recording) lets bystanders quickly identify both the potential for recording, and the actual action of recording, making it less covert and creepy than past attempts by other companies to integrate image/video capture into a wearable form factor.

All of these points underscore that Snap Inc. is a company equally, if not more interested in understanding cultural forces than specific technologies (see their sponsorship of cultural projects like Real Life magazine or Theorizing the Web conference), their hardware enables the culture, not the other way around. This is an incredibly rare thing for tech companies to understand and truly prioritize. The companies that do frequently enjoy better returns on investment than their competitors: companies like Slack, Beats, and Bevel have customers that are buying and using their products as fans, not just seeking a set of easily commoditized features.