> Compared with Twitter or Facebook, Snapchat can seem almost aggressively user-unfriendly. If you’re new to the app and looking for posts by your kid, your boyfriend, or DJ Khaled, good luck. It’s hard to find somebody without knowing his or her screen name. This is by design. “We’ve made it very hard for parents to embarrass their children,” Spiegel said at a conference in January. “It’s much more for sharing personal moments than it is about this public display.”
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-snapchat-built-a...
Snapchat ‘16 was “confusing” because it didn’t hand hold you and a lot of features weee behind invisible swipes. The features were there, it was just hard to realize that they existed.
Snapchat ‘18 isn’t confusing. It’s bad because they de-emphasized everything about why people used the app and instead heavily pushed their own content. It’s practically a different app with a different purpose - it’s a tabloid rag rather than a social network.
Snapchat felt more personal than FB/IG, and I guess Spiegal saw all the celebs using the app and killed the goose trying to monetize that.
Otherwise, I (xennial) tried it twice and found the UI rather confusing.
Yah, not successful at all.
In the context of valuation and business decisions, it turns out having a lot of users isn't enough. If it was, Snapchat wouldn't be in trouble and we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
As a further point, note that you're citing 2014 and 2016 figures, and I did say, "especially in 2019." Yahoo never recouped its acquisition price from Tumblr.
.... I don't know that thats really a generation.
A generation typically involves a period of time at least as long as the organism takes to reach sexual reproductive age.
It is depressing to me how low the bar is for our ability to learn an application. If the UI has more than a single list or button, it becomes "impossible to navigate". There was a time when users would expect some time getting to know their application and even, dare I say, read a guide or manual! Sometimes extremely powerful, creative, and useful tools will have a learning curve. Snap could offer some amazing capabilities, but because of this "simple is everything" mindset, they will face outrage if they expose anything beyond message passing.
It is completely nonsensical how Snapchat works. You have to swipe every which way and there's no clues when to swipe where. You just have to memorize the magical incantation to do what you want through trial and error.
We as a society have built up a fantastic 'language' of UI. We know what buttons and menus, etc do. Snapchat throws away all the ways you want to intuitively navigate and give you no clues about what to do instead.
However, I think your description also fits CLI's which has always led me to wonder if maybe Snapchat's UI is really a way forward as a "native mobile" CLI of a sort.
We're already seeing things like pinch-to-zoom, swipe to move next, etc. being taken and recombined for all sorts of apps.
This is probably one of my favorite things about the CLI versus GUI. There is nothing worse than working with cli apps that have weird incantations.
I've been using command-line interfaces for a pretty long time now, and I'm incredibly thankful that these days I can look something up on the internet and generally find a list of some examples on how to use things. Man pages are generally incredibly verbose in all the wrong ways (far too much information, far too little that you actually want) and the -h switch at best gives you some flags and descriptions that are fundamentally too short to teach you anything useful. There is no real global standard for what kind of flags or inputs do what things (for example, far from every program with a CLI interface will actually accept "-" as an input file even though that's one of those things a lot of people use and should therefore be pretty obvious), further obfuscating the core workings of anything you might be using.
The applications you are thinking of served preexisting needs, so it required more upfront complexity.
Something like Snapchat's UI does not have the burden of fulfilling a previously existing need. That is, until they redesigned it. Then suddenly, the new UI had to provide for a pre-existing need and as an obvious consequence, has been more difficult for both new and existing users.