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I’ve got 20 years in tech and I find products like Snapchat extremely difficult to use. It’s NOT intuitive at all. Is it just me, or is it terrible?

• ok_coo 7y ago
  Mobile app discoverability is terrible, it’s not just you. I guess you’re just supposed to monkey around with it and hope you find new features.
  • ryandrake 7y ago
    Mobile app discoverability could be great, but we're currently going through this excruciatingly hostile minimalist design fad where every feature needs to be hidden away out of sight, with barely understandable affordances to get at them. > [recommendations in the article] > * Little or no navigation required to access the information or commands required to solve the problem > * Few steps and a minimal number of operators > * Problem resolution requiring the respondent to apply explicit criteria only (no implicit criteria) I think this is telling us what to do. Stop hiding things away behind hamburger menus and replacing interactive, rich dialogs with a chain of single-choice dialogs. Don't hide context or make assumptions. I've heard designers say things like "you should have a maximum of one decision on the screen at once" and "you should provide a maximum of two choices for each decision." But why? It's just more steps, more hidden assumptions, longer dialog chains for the user to navigate and more complicated logic (e.g. handling "go back" in the middle of one of these chains). But hey, I don't have a fine art degree so my input about a good user experience is worthless.
• Spivak 7y ago
  I think by most standards Snapchat’s UX would be judged pretty harshly. But it has a strong following because at its core it’s a power user app. Making features/actions discoverable takes up UI space that Snapchat almost entirely hides behind swipes or unlabeled buttons. Snapchat’s philosophy is interesting because it’s designed for people who already know how to use Snapchat. It actually increased the social aspect a bit because most everyone probably has a story or two of being shown how to do something by someone else.
  • ericras 7y ago
    That’s a good way to describe it. It’s interesting that an anti-pattern (bad UI/UX) can be an asset like that. Snapchat is the Bloomberg Terminal for teens.
  • Zircom 7y ago
    >Snapchat’s philosophy is interesting because it’s designed for people who already know how to use Snapchat. It actually increased the social aspect a bit because most everyone probably has a story or two of being shown how to do something by someone else. Very true. Just last night a person I've been on a few dates with showed me that they apparently added multiplayer games to snapchat quite awhile ago and I had no idea they existed til then.
• sneak 7y ago
  Snapchat is very opaque, but greatly encourages experimentation. It’s got a learning curve, but fits a tremendous amount into a very sparse interface. In some ways it is like vim. I’m not sure if that is praise or criticism.
• fragmede 7y ago
  This is the information age. Just Google it. I don't meant that flippantly. One of their best features, the Snap Map, is nigh undiscoverable. But after seeing someone else use it and being unable to figure out how to access it, Google was able to tell me. It's absolutely a failure of their UX but say, what's the discoverability of regexps with and without Google? Jira also suffers from the same problem - it's often far easier and far faster to just Google how to do something, rather than figure out eg which particular permissions system you want to be in, in order to be allowed to do a particular action.
  • cameronbrown 7y ago
    Usually with Snapchat, new features spread organically. Teens show other teens how it works, etc..
  • 0xDEFC0DE 7y ago
    It's hilarious watching engineers give up on a mobile app and then go right back to fixing bugs in complicated code
  • t34543 7y ago
    My point isn’t that I can’t figure it out, it’s that it’s painful to use. Someone is paid to be in charge of the ui/ux, their objective is mysterious because it’s not usability.
• PinkMilkshake 7y ago
  My understanding was that Snapchat is like that on purpose. Facebook became uncool with younger people because it became cool with older people. Snapchat want to avoid that, so the overuse of hidden gestures acts like a filter. I found it almost impenetrable (I'm over 30) and I had to ask my friends 18 year old sister how to use it.
• squeaky-clean 7y ago
  Snapchat is a weird edge case because they've claimed they intentionally made some features difficult to find in the UX to encourage conversation about the app. Don't know if it actually pays off positively for them, because I also find it confusing. But there's definitely been many moments of "Whoa, You can add a friend that way? You can do this by holding that button down?" etc
• asdff 7y ago
  I've been using snapchat since it came out, and it's definitely gotten worse like a lot of users have said. It used to be that you'd have your list of recent snaps and a camera—that's it. Then they added stories and a contact list, and then they had to make money with the platform and things truly went to shit. That being said, it's not nearly as clunky as instagram's clone. I'd say regular users have gotten used to the death by thousand cuts at this point, like Latin evolving into vulgar Latin then later romance languages, and totally incomprehensible to someone who's just downloaded the app.
• TeMPOraL 7y ago
  It is terrible. But it's a nice counterargument to all the 'make the UI for the minimum viable user' thinking. It's a demonstration that if people care even a little bit, they can figure even such terrible, undiscoverable UI like Snapchat out.
• Angostura 7y ago
  I foind Snapchat impossible too, but I get the feeling that to an extent its deliberate gatekeeping to keep us old folk out.
  • bakuninsbart 7y ago
    Which is fair, we already ruined facebook.