Why Snapchat wins
Enhancement of usability through simplicity is not a new concept. It’s an idea pioneered by early innovators like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, who led the creation and development of user-friendly interfaces for perhaps the geekiest thing on earth: the early computer.
These “interfaces” are everywhere. There is no doubt that a few decades ago, computers were highly technical and incredibly complex. But an interface makes all of that super easy to learn and operate — and love.
A war began in the technology world to create software products that were so user-friendly (by keeping their learning curve in control) that anyone could use them with ease and enjoy them for fun and entertainment. And that war has been going on for decades until recently when a software product hit the market created by three former students from Stanford University. They founded the company on September 16, 2011, and with their team, came up with a software design that made it an entirely a different game to socialize on the Internet. That company is Snap Inc.
Snapchat topples everything upside down in the software world by violating the core principles and essential rules of user-friendly app design. It’s the incredibly successful anti-interface strategy that is rushing them to the top of the trade, and they have growth margins to show for it, too.
Giant social media stakeholders like Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Apple, Cyber Dust, Wickr, Clipchat, amongst others. have adopted some of their brilliant ideas from Snapchat, and the competition is becoming even more fierce. Snapchat captures the attention of a significant demographic segment of people under the age of forty. Let’s take a closer look at the question of what is behind the explosive growth of this social media product. A lot of the success lies in the user interface of Snapchat — something that annoys many, delights even more, and which the biggest companies are slavishly copying.
Snapchat moves against the tide
There are many apps out there that allow sharing images. Designers of apps push to make their user interfaces more intuitive than before and easier than what their competitors offer. It’s a fierce battle, but the astonishing fact about Snapchat is that it’s not conventionally intuitive at all and yet surpasses all other apps in its growth and popularity. This success somewhat had a blow back when big names like Apple and Instagram start entering the market by following the Snapchat model.
When Snapchat was first rolled out as a product, its growth was incredible. Since it’s release in September 2011 till May 2017, Snapchat’s worth was estimated to be $33 billion dollars. 60% of all the mobiles in the world, carry Snapchat, and it’s on its way to compete with the biggest social media giant, Facebook. In fact, Fortune.com reports that “Snap CEO will be get paid as much as Mark Zuckerberg after his IPO.” Until recently, Snapchat allegedly fell to competition from other giant software companies that started to replicate some of the features of Snapchat. Tech giants are quickly catching up, and some are reporting that Snapchat has lost its hype and is cooling down as Snap Inc. executives remain optimistic and they expect the Snapchat market to grow.
A black-box that you can see into
Snapchat turns your mobile into a black-box in which only inputs and outputs are known.
Only people who have high curiosity or are very comfortable in a digital world bother to use Snapchat. You may have guessed it: kids, young adults, and millennials all love Snapchat while those older struggle until they are comfortable with it. It is the age group that is estimated to be below 40 years. They are digitally native: many have played with technology since they were infants.
Being a partial black-box, the marketing of the app also takes fuel from social platforms in the form of word-of-mouth and in-real-life implications.
Progressive rewards
Snapchat rewards users in the form of revealing a new feature at various levels of app usage. It is a strategy that mimics the gaming world. The user attains a new degree of satisfaction when he or she receives a reward for the level of engagement that further enhances the usability. Snapchat is very successful with this strategy, and statistically speaking, Snapchat users spend 30 minutes a day on average on this platform.
Swift engagements for users
Snapchat compels its users to engage with its interface actively. There is no passive way to open Snapchat. You do not have a landing page on Snapchat. There are no welcome or greetings with splash screens. Instead, the app starts your camera as soon as you click on its icon. This feature can save you valuable moments in your reaction time and capture a scene that can be lost forever with a delayed response. You can conveniently snap a picture or start making a movie right off the bat without wasting time again and again as opposed to traditional camera apps.
Some of our favorite time-saving features that users seem to love:
- The complete takeover of the camera on the mobile screen real-estate.
- Jumping into the action state — promptly ready to take a picture — right when the app loads.
- While making a movie, the video button has to be pressed continuously giving you a sense of control over your device.
- No general social obligations, such as the “like buttons” or “comment boxes” except a minimal number of widgets that Snapchat designers deem necessary.
Ephemeral content
The daring introduction of this feature in Snapchat is something that has caught the attention of the social media world. Every big platform like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others have investments focusing on incremental volumes of content and its storage facilities. Snapchat completely changes the game by capitalizing on content that lives for a short while. When a picture or a video comes to your mobile phone from a friend on Snapchat, it remains there for a short few seconds and then deliberately deletes itself. You only have the time to look at it or save it. As you save it, a message of this action goes and informs the sender. Video lives for a bit longer time than a picture. Most people give this feature a thumbs up because most of the pics and videos from social media keep on piling up in user’s device and it hardly comes into reuse.
Another peculiar advantage of having content that auto-deletes itself is the protection of privacy of Snapchat users. This feature provides a safeguard. The extraordinary success of Snapchat is due in large part to this feature — one of the first apps to capitalize on it.
Facebook and Twitter make users manually select a picture out of dozens of images, but Snapchat shines here also when it compels you to go with just one piece of content. It promotes more sharing instead of being concerned with selecting or “curating” content. This Snapchat strategy works as there is a majority of people on the globe that don’t consider themselves to be creative. Up to three-quarters of the world’s population don’t consider themselves creative, and Snapchat doesn’t care if you’re creative either. They just want you to share.
Making businesses entertaining
Research carried out by Twitter concludes that “lifelogging” (sharing events from your life) is not found to be entertaining. Snapchat turned that upside down by introducing a feature called “Stories.” You can share snaps from the events in your life in a linear, self-playing format. It is a Snapchat feature that has made its way into almost every major competitor’s social media product.
Commercial brands benefit by creating ads that do not look like ads at all. Now businesses seem cooler, and users don’t notice or care as much about ad content inside their feeds. According to a report, Snapchat’s current revenue grew from $58.7 million in December 2015 to $404.5 million one year later in December 2016. It is a phenomenal growth on the part of a company that was not sure how to make money from their platform a few years back.
There are no doubts that Snapchat is a game changer. Individuals, as well as businesses, had a deep influence on their audiences through the bright ideas leveraged in this app. Snapchat is transforming and redefining the ways we use modern technology by taking new risks while they keep on breaking the mainstream rules of usability. Being an imperfect black-box, Snapchat has left much of the work to figure out how it works on to the users while being very fast in performing tasks of creating content and sharing it once you get the hang of it. It has some very awesome concealed features that reveal themselves when the user reaches a certain level of usability.
- It is quite obvious that Snapchat has been made very fast and efficient by giving priority to the speed of execution of the task at hand.
- The feature that allows the content to expire after a short while, it is the crown jewel of Snapchat that makes this product increasingly popular among females.
- Snapchat also carries tools that make the user content very entertaining.
- The individuals and brands can create advertisement content with powerful emotional elements, after all, people buy for emotional reasons.
Snapchat is obviously capitalizing on monotonous features that persist on other social media platforms by coming up with novel ideas that make Snapchat stand out from the crowd. As a result, soon the social media features will be more dynamic and competitive than ever before
On the other hand, Snapchat did not do as well as before in the last quarter of 2016 which leads to a conclusion that innovation can quickly fall to replication. The challenges for the businesses known for their innovative ideas like Snapchat force them to come with even better ideas. As the recent figures show there is a slowdown in the popularity of Snapchat, but the executives at Snapchat remain optimistic that Snapchat will regain its momentum. If they are correct on this, then the question remains that how far into the future will these fascinating upside-down strategies take Snapchat on the winning streak as it continues to challenge the big social media players.
