Idea: Suggested friends / follows on Stories screen & watch Stories before adding on Snapchat (#17)

Fits with Stories experience of viewing & includes swipe up to “Add as Friend” or swipe to view next person’s Stories. Suggestions based on Contacts, friends’ friends with public Stories, and known people ranked by likelihood of interest given other known people already watched by the person.

Tap to view person, tap to advance through Stories, swipe up to add as friend, swipe down to return to Story, swipe right to left to go to next person, and swipe down to return to Stories list and note that the suggested list expanded down because viewing Stories went past the first two suggestions that were visible initially. Designed by D.J. Sherrets.

Snapchat today:

• Discovery of people to follow is based on meeting people in person, seeing people mentioned in Stories or online, and connecting contacts.
• Previously there was an ability to see “Best Friends” of a given user so a few people, but now there’s no ability to see that.
• Related is that there’s no recommendation of people to add unless you have those people in your contact list.
• You can find people to follow if someone is nearby you, or if you use a Snapcode.

Proposed idea:

1. Start on the Stories view. Tap on “Contact Name 1” to view their Story.
2. Tap to next post.
3. Tap to next post.
4. All posts by Contact Name 1 have been viewed. Tap closes Contact Name 1 and moves to Known Person 2.
5. Swipe up to see ability to add as friend.
6. Tap to add as friend. You could tap to undo if you wanted.
7. Swipe down.
8. Swipe from right to left to advance to Suggested Person 19.
9. Swipe down to return to the Stories view.

Comments:

• Opportunity is to enable people to view Stories of people who are suggested to add / follow.
• Alternatively put suggested people lower in list of friends, such as perhaps in middle of listed of algorithmic list of friends, but still identify as suggestions so clear to user.
• Some people don’t realize that you can follow Stories of a person who has decided to make their Stories public. So there’s an opportunity with some promoting of this to show people this can be done.
• Note that there is an algorithmic ranking of friends to view. In case this promotion results in people following a lot of users who they end up not viewing, then the algorithmic ranking can help with prioritizing people they may care most about such as close friends.
• Opportunity is to help new users with finding people who may provide a reason to come back to view Stories regularly, such as known people.
• “Known Person” could be someone such as a musician or athlete or anyone who has some following on Snapchat that is beyond friends.
• When viewing a Story by one person, swiping is used to advance to the next person’s Story for simplicity. Also, a limit of 3 posts in a Story per person is used to focus on deciding, and reaching the end automatically opens to the next suggested person.
• An alternative is to not enable swiping to view the next contact’s Story. This may make sense for first version. I think there’s an opportunity to use the swipe to advance to next person’s Story and default advance to the next person when done viewing all posts in a Story as part of viewing the algorithmic friends list as well. So using swipe in the suggested list would be done for consistency.
• Another opportunity is to highlight Stories of contacts who have allowed Stories to be public so Stories can be viewed without adding the person first. This simplifies the process and may increase how many people are added as friends.
• A strength of Snapchat is that — except for “Best Friends” previously — friends lists are private for users by default. Snapchat needs to figure out the privacy of how there can be recommendations of people who may be friends including determining whether Snapchat users want or have an expectation that their Snapchat friends could appear in suggested friend lists.
• So question is if getting recommendations of possible friends is fine to do based on who your friends are friends with so long as there’s no stating which friend knows that person.
• Challenge for Snapchat to continue without recommending friends beyond Contacts is that finding friends may take a long time or may not happen, and so Snapchat users may not be able to find friends that they otherwise would enjoy connecting with.
• Reasons to only add by Contacts or word of mouth for friends include to focus on close ties relationships, though over time close ties relationships can become less close so may be a temporary benefit. Algorithmic feed and other features can help figure out which people a given user wants to view or share with.

Tap to view, tap to advance, swipe up to add as friend…

..swipe down to return to Stories view. Designed by D.J. Sherrets.

© 2016 D.J. Sherrets