How hacked solutions to a problem present an opportunity for disruption
Understanding why people share screenshots & how that led to our Big Idea.
Have you ever sent a screenshot of content to a friend on chat? We explore the motivations of sharing screenshots and present a better solution.
We did a lot of user interviews during the customer discovery phase for Cubeit. This led to an insight we did not expect — a hack that people employed when sharing content with friends led us to an unexpected problem.
Here’s a typical user interview:
Me: “So what’s your preferred method of sharing stuff with your close friends?”
User: “I use WhatsApp/Messenger”
Me: “What kind of content do you share”
User: “Photos, a lot of photos, some videos, links to articles, and oh a lot of screenshots.”
Me: “Screenshots of what?”
User: “Mostly content from other apps — tweets, or photos of something I saw on FB, or a dress I saw on Amazon, or flight ticket details. Bunch of stuff.”
Me: “But why not send links to the content you want to share?”
User: “I’m never sure whether the other person has the app I am sharing content from. It’s really irritating when I share a link and I get a response asking what the link is about. Screenshots are way easier for the other person to understand what I am sharing. So I’d rather share a screenshot of the tweet rather than the link to the tweet itself.”
Me: “Eureka!”
People share screenshots — a lot — and if we dig a little bit deeper and ask why, some things become obvious.
1. Links give you no Context
People share links — of articles, videos, locations, tweets, hotel reviews, products from Amazon, and much more. Links, more often than not, are garbled text which do not give you any information about the content being shared. Screenshots give you instant context about the content being shared. Example — if you had to share the review of a restaurant from a new app you’ve been using, you’d rather share a screenshot than the link of the app.
2. People don’t have all the apps you use
A lot of times you’ve sent links to friends from apps they don’t have on their phone. A screenshot smooths out the process of making content understandable. You can open the image and understand the content irrespective of whether they have the app on their phone or not.
3. Switching Apps
This is the clincher. When somebody shares a link within a conversation, it leads to a series of actions.
Click on the link -> Switch to another application (browser/app) -> View content -> Go back to the app where the link was shared -> Continue your conversation.
On your desktop this is easy — because the browser does a great job of encapsulating different kinds of content on one platform. You can click any link sent to you and open it on another tab, a near seamless experience.
On the mobile, switching apps and multitasking is a nightmare
because of the screen size (something Android N aims to fix). This is where screenshots become really powerful. You open the screenshot sent to you within the chat app and immediately understand what was sent to you.
But of course screenshots have their own problems
(hey who doesn’t have issues <shrug>)
- It’s just an image — So you really liked that dress somebody sent you a screenshot of from the Amazon app, but what now? You still need a way to actually buy the dress -> i.e install the app/go to the website, search for the dress, and buy it. Images on their own are not “actionable”.
- You can’t search inside screenshots — What happens when you want to find the screenshot of a fun tweet somebody sent you? Stumped eh?
Based on these insights, we came up with something to solve the exact problem that screenshots solve, but with a 10x better experience.
It’s called Cubeit.
Imagine if the product from Amazon was shared with you not as a screenshot, but as an actionable card, like this.
Why is the experience in Cubeit better?
In Cubeit, any link you share with friends is converted into a card. A card is essentially a screenshot — it intelligently extracts important information from the link and shows it to you up front. This does two things.
- Gives context on the product without opening the link
- Understands the action required on this type of content (Shop) and provides a CTA which links to the Amazon app/website for you to view->consume->buy all in the same context.
Here’s another example
Links are made actionable. So a card will link to the content behind it, in exactly the way you want. Sent a location to someone? It’s converted into a card with convenient buttons to book an Uber or Navigate.
Cards from different apps can be grouped together as ‘Cubes’ to make it easier for you to organize and share as a stack — so you can quickly group cards from different sources under one concept and share it with your friends.
That’s the core of Cubeit — Make sharing better by making content consumable & actionable.
There’s a few more fun things that we do — for example searching through multiple apps from inside Cubeit. Simple use case: You’ve seen a great product on Product Hunt yesterday, and want to quickly send it to a friend.
The Old way — Go to Product Hunt (website/app), find the content, share it with chat app, send to contact within chat app.
If you’re among the many (we hope) that are excited about supercharging your content and making it work for you — you can get Cubeit on the Play Store.
And don’t forget to hit the little green heart below and share with your friends! (Only if you like it of course :))
