How Big is Snapchat?
What is your reaction to the sentence “statistical analysis of content sharing through digital platforms”? For most, it’s boredom or indifference. However, the website How Big is Snapchat (HBIS) flips this notion on its head. Take a minute to navigate the website here.
HBIS is an interactive infographic that utilizes visual statistic representation. In other words, it’s a way to present otherwise boring information in a fun and interesting way. To illustrate the importance of this concept, I’d like to turn to some examples. Compare this website and these infographics to HBIS.
All of them have essentially the same information, namely content sharing on Snapchat, but each present them in a different way. HBIS is the most effective in communicating these ideas due to the way the medium, an interactive website, is constructed.
The website engages the audience in two major ways; through the content and the presentation.
The content -the size of Snapchat, and, by extension, social media use and its implications- touches on relevant topics especially for today’s generation who use Snapchat more than most groups. It is presented in a way that requires minimal audience interaction: scrolling through the website in order to progress through the experience, the ability to change how the statistics are represented and to move around elements on the page. These seemingly minor actions make the users feel more invested by making them an essential part of the experience.
However clever the presentations is, in this case there is little narrative. It is limited to showing the overwhelming rate of content sharing on Snapchat. As a result, the audience is not prompted to think about the information given and process the implications of these statistics. Simply adding a poll at the end of the website with questions along the lines of “is this good or bad?” would encourage further reflection and thus increase the audience’s investment into the experience.
Moreover, making the website compatible with iPhones and Androids would complement well the information presented. Imagine accessing HBIS on your phone and, as soon as you exit, seeing the Snapchat app on the same device. Having this experience in the same “space” as the social media platform that is the subject of the statistics would prolong the audience’s reflection on the information.
Presenting otherwise boring statistics and information in a more interesting and engaging manner, matters because it can increase public awareness of any given topic.
TLDR: check out the distilled version of this article here.
