I was interested in snaphat over the weekend because it updated and changed how information was presented in a very major way that was surprising to me. The first thing I noticed was when updating the app it doesn’t have a good rating, which doesn’t cause us to act in any particular way, I just thought it was something really strange because it’s so popular and is even #1 in photo and video. Why do we all use it if we don’t appear to like it?
Onto the update functions I noticed, the first change I noticed was the screen to select who you want to send a snap to. It is broken into more clearly separated groups of people which are stories, best friends, recents, groups, and friends. This constructs the user by making it easier to send snaps to certain people. The way it’s organized makes it so you want to post a story or send it to the people you are already sending messages to because those are the top categories. It isn’t much different than before other than it looks nicer, but the group button was what really caught my attention. Because I don’t have any groups on snapchat I was presented with the message “You don’t have any groups yet! 🙃” The upside down smiley face always reads as really passive aggressive to me, so this constructs the user in a way that tries to make you feel bad for not using this function. It’s saying “oh you don’t have groups yet. ok it’s fine it’s whatever even though you should totally do it i’m not mad about it it’s cool your loss.”
Finally, the biggest change and the one I’m least happy with is in the way stories are presented. I follow Cr1tikal on snapchat who is a pretty popular youtuber, and he posted a story on snapchat. Later in the day when I got the update, I noticed that in the section where stories used to be, his looked like one of the weird articles that snapchat tries to push it’s users into reading. None of my other friends stories were there, his was only there because he is a popular person. It even says popular story on his image. I kept scrolling down to find people I knew in this section, only to see a bunch of random people’s stories or articles about something or I don’t even know what. Like who is the user “Chunky?” I don’t know her. I don’t want to see her story. To find my friend’s stories, they were moved to the list of friends. If you swipe left, they are now there and if you swipe right is where all the articles and random people are located. This constructs users by separating who you know into a private location and eveyone else into another location, which I guess makes it more organized? But it’s just confusing and unnecessary. I think it’s also pushing the idea that you should care about these people. They’re popular, so you should care. Your friends lives don’t matter as much and their stories are presented in a less obvious way now because of that.