Overview

Snapchat utilizes manipulative UX tactics to retrieve and maintain the relevance of its’ app, which negatively impacts its dominating impressionable, young consumers.

With around 48% of Snapchat users being around the ages 14-25 (according to the Social Shepherd), Snapchat persists to be a dominant social media app primarily due to its manipulative patterns of triggering social adolescent insecurities and addictive tendencies.

Design Challenge

Solution

A realistic Snapchat interface that highlights Snapchat’s ethical features, strips its deceptive patterns, and adds complementary properties for user satisfaction.

Initial Research

I asked 7 college students ages 19-22 to walk me through what they love about different social media apps and boiled it down to 3 categories:

Ephemeral Content
As of recently, users gravitate towards social media functions that are marketed as “ephemeral” or temporary. For instance, Instagram and Snapchat stories expire after 24 hours. Unlike traditional posts, these offer a low-commitment option to share media without the pressure of permanence and outside perception. It’s become a way for users to engage with social media more casually and spontaneously.
Labels & Affiliations
Whether it's discovering which Harry Potter character they are or delving into their zodiac signs and personality types, users are loving ways to connect and express their identities in entertaining and creative formats. These digital features provide users with fun ways to describe themselves to a niche community.
Personal Visualizations
This is evident in the popularity of features like "Spotify Wrapped," "Receiptify," and "Festify," which offer unique ways to showcase past music preferences and behaviors. These features tap into the users’ natural interest with self-reflection and nostalgia, as they present the users’ experiences in a digestible and visually appealing format.

Designs & Wireframes

With those discoveries, I cultivated 4 functionalities to implement in the interface in replacement of it's dark patterns, all to conserve the fun, social experience on Snapchat.

Wireframes for profile page, music, & mood status pop-ups.

Collaborative Stories

Snapchat enable you to create stories with your friends and other communities of people, where, in contrast to a regular private story, all who can view the story can post and share content. For the "sense of community" Snapchat promotes on the app for you to share unnecessary private details like your location, this is a way better feature to promote without encouraging tracking.

Highlights

A curated story reel based on the most engaging posts you had that week. (based on your engagement with it.)

Mood Status

A daily limited-word update that displays on your profile page. (Likened to Twitter or Instagram notes)

Add Your Song

Search through the web's songs and add one you resonate with or love and display it on your profile page.

User Testing & Changes

I had 6 of my friends to test out my prototype of a Snapchat without its dark patterns. Without going into detail about the UX manipulation tactics, they received my prototype well and felt it natural to an actual app update.

Corresponding to their suggestions, I changed the "Highlights" feature to a horizontal bar stacked before a user's private stories. This gives the impression that the user will be tapping a story experience, and find it easily every week without fail.

I added a Saved Section to the "Song Status" pop-up to encourage more user personalization.

I also implemented more visual aspects to the Mood Status, adding Snapchat's signature visuals (Emojis! 🥳)

Results & Reflections

With those tweaks, here are my final results:

If I had more time, there are a few next steps I would like to take . . .

‍Address gamification. I would like to find a more translatable solution to Snapchat’s popular streaks and “snapscores” without simply cutting them completely off. It would be refreshing to see how this would change my views as a designer, where I would hurdle over gamification and find where the developers can still have an advantage.

‍Increase privacy and user responsibility. Snapchat is quite popular for its disappearing chats and media, which leaves a lot of users the impression that they have no digital footprint. Through verbiage, pop-ups, and disclaimers, I want to implement ways that stir users away from incriminating content and maintain their sense of responsibility over their actions online whilst preserving the uniqueness of Snapchat’s ephemeral features.

Moral UI Redesign

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