Snapchat is the New Vine: How a Refocus
on Content Can Revive Shortform Video

Is it time for Snap Inc. to cut the cord & take a risk on the Discover platform?

(Note: Since this was written, Snapchat has undergone a significant redesign, both affirming and in some ways complicating the points made in the piece.)

Snapchat is bloated to bursting. In the last two years, the app’s download size has just about quadrupled. In the same time, Snap Inc. has beefed up its product offerings with a bundle of new features, including Discover, Lenses, Stickers, Bitstrips, Memories, and Snap Maps.

The result of all that extra meat? I just opened the app; by my count, it takes an average of six full seconds (a small eternity in smartphone time) for an iPhone 6 to fully load and stand ready to take a photo. And that’s not even mentioning the struggle Snapchat users face on the regular: the app’s heavy weight on battery power so often serves the fatal blow to a dying phone.

It’s true, the app is going through an identity crisis and packing on the pounds to prove it. While one side of the platform houses the bread and butter messaging service, the other is actively being filled with original, interactive video and magazine content on the Discover portal. For a sense of scale, there are now over 40 contributing publishers on Snapchat Discover.

By all accounts, Snapchat is now an important hub of both news and entertainment. But as the two diverging ends of the app grow, housing both Snapchat and Discover under the same name becomes trickier (to the detriment of users and Snap). How soon will it be before Snap Inc. creates a standalone app for its Discover service, and what should it look like when they do?

“On mobile, each app can only focus on doing one thing well.”

In 2014, during a Q&A livestream, Mark Zuckerberg revealed the reasoning behind Facebook’s decision to split its Messenger service into a standalone application separate from the Facebook mobile app, “On mobile, each app can only focus on doing one thing well…You’re probably messaging people 15 times per day. Having to go into an app and take a bunch of steps to get to messaging is a lot of friction.”

Friction is exactly the rub for Snapchat. The app’s basic UI, the way in which its pages are designed and respond to user interaction, is limited almost exclusively to horizontal and vertical swipes.

Most messaging apps work with some form of parent-child navigation at the core. Users can usually tap through a recipient’s name or profile on the home screen (the parent) to arrive at a thread of messages (the child).

The Snapchat home screen eschews this norm in favor of the camera, toeing the line of Snap Inc.’s “camera company” MO. You won’t find any tabs, categories, or text on this home screen, beyond a vacant search bar.

It’s like the app is a long scroll, rather than a book that can be opened.

The app’s UI can be maneuvered as follows: Swipe right from the camera for photo messages. From there, you can either swipe right again on a contact’s name to access a message thread, or pinch to zoom out to access Snap Maps. Going back to the home screen, you can swipe left for Stories and left once more for Discover. Swipe up from home to see saved photos in Memories and down for Settings.

This swipe-card design complements Snapchat’s messaging service and pretty effectively prioritizes photo over text content. Problem is, it makes navigating to the app’s newer features increasingly difficult.

For perspective, there were only two menu screens — the camera and recent snaps — in the first version of the app. During these olden days, in-app maneuverability required only a single swipe left or right. Now, if you’ve been counting, there are a total of eight screens in the same style of design, with no categorical elements and no drop-down menus to quickly switch or skip between screens on the far ends of the product.

Here’s the gist: Swipe, swipe, swipe through an experience you don’t need to be in until you’re finally where you want to be.

For users, this design is unfriendly — if you’re in a message thread with a contact who’s yet to respond, scrolling to Tastemade’s Discover card to occupy yourself takes four swipes through a lagging, loading space that fires up the camera and drains the phone’s battery. You’ve gotta go past them, even when you have no intent to use those features.

For Snap and its Discover contributors, this is also a big issue. Making that move from messages to Discover, the space in the app’s ecosystem with the most ads, requires more steps through unwanted content than it ever should. When a user’s battery drains, so does their ability and their willingness to click through ads and sponsored content.

Before a 2016 update, Discover and Stories were featured on the same page. After Discover received its own swipe left, some publishers saw their viewership drop by as much as 1/3.

Snap Maps’ placement alone is evidence to the app’s overcrowded UI. The pinch-to-zoom motion required to access the feature is inconsistent with the app’s other swipe-based maneuvers — one more swipe to the left or right would’ve been overkill.

A standalone Discover app would be the perfect opportunity to depressurize Snapchat and build a more permanent and social feed.

The simple solution to these problems would be a design overhaul. Make Discover easier to access, bring content closer to the forefront. This, however, would likely tamper with the architecture of the app, one that works incredibly well for Snapchat’s core messaging service.

A redesign also ignores the problem of the app’s engorged size. The burgeoning Discover is now dedicated to full-fledged video series in addition to magazine content. Recently, a partnership between NBC News and Snap was announced for the release of a twice-daily news show. Earlier in the year, NBC’s “The Voice” received a historic Emmy nomination for its Discover show.

A standalone Discover app would be the perfect opportunity to depressurize Snapchat and build a more permanent and social feed that focuses on interactive and high quality video and multimedia content.

While Vine, a video platform perhaps most similar to Discover, failed to turn a profit through ads and premium content by its laymen user base, Snap has fostered partnerships with dozens of publications and contributors through Discover right from the start. It is primed for standalone success under the Snapchat brand and as a service supported and well-used by publishers.

Some obvious critical questions come to light with the suggestion of a standalone Discover app.

In a talk with Kara Swisher of Recode, Hearst CCO Joanna Coles discussed Cosmopolitan’s early Snapchat efforts, describing the users they target, “Well, you swipe right, and you come on to Discover, and you find these things that will soak up the terrifying idea of boredom and the terrifying idea of being on your own.”

Some obvious critical questions come to light with this suggestion: How much traffic comes into Discover through actual curiosity and the intent to keep up with news/shows, and how much of it is users staving off boredom while waiting for someone to respond to a message?

According to Sean Mills, Snap Inc.’s head of original content, average users open the Snapchat app 18 times per day. During how many of those sessions do users actually open the Discover feature?

Before it could become a standalone app, Discover might need to develop into a more vital media space — considering the speed at which Snapchat is growing its features and partnerships, that shouldn’t take long.

Jonathan Tyler Hogeback

Written by

i’m from Ohio cut me some slack. Chicago-based writer, eater, editor, and ornithophobe.

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