Thanks to my (non-tech) roommates and sisters, I've been using Snapchat a lot recently.

Yesterday, I downloaded Facebook Poke and had an immediate (and odd) reaction: it was too well-designed.

Snaps are ephemeral, silly, and spontaneous, but Poke's polished UI and thoughtful UX didn't seem to support that behavior. It made me feel like I was doing it wrong.

Related, we've heard that Branch's UI makes some folks feel like they can't post anything that isn't thoughtful and "academic."

Can amazing design actually hinder user behavior in certain contexts?

I think it's pretty simple. Design and aesthetics influence how a person interacts with your product or service. Beyond ugly/slick or "well-designed", whether you choose to do something that's all dark colors, or clean and stark, or full of skeumorphic elements, those decisions will affect how a person perceives they should act.

"Amazing design" is amazing if you get people to do what you intended. So no, it can't hinder.

That's a really great point, Kevin. Design isn't about something looking pretty, it's about solving problems and guiding user behavior.

That being said, if Facebook Poke was released with bright primary colors and a playful UI I'm sure the larger design community would be up in arms, no?

I think the main detractor for Poke is not necessarily the design, it's the environment.

I go to find people to poke, and I see the same old tired set of Facebook friends which then induces worry - who will see this stuff? Is it really temporary? How do I keep this off of Facebook? How do I actually find this on Facebook?

That's one of the great things about (formerly) new services (like Path, Kik, Instagram) - you get a fresh start. You're not burdened by your social media baggage. You can post more freely because you know that your high school friends won't see or won't care.

Snapchat has this feel - you can only add friends via mobile number. It's a very intimate connection.

Ah, so true, Greg. With anything Facebook-related you're inherently worried about your behavior being broadcasted to the Newsfeed, without your explicit permission.

Though my hunch is the folks that you're Snapchatting with are the same ones you talk with most frequently on Facebook.

Interesting: @Buzz reminds us that similar arguments were made about MySpace: businessweek.com

"if Facebook Poke was released with bright primary colors and a playful UI I'm sure the larger design community would be up in arms, no?"

And why should one care unless the larger design community is your audience? If you look at Seibo, China's Twitter equivalent that boasts an incredible number of users, it would make any Western designer's eyes bleed. But it works for their audience so I'd say they're doing it right.

I think experience and network still trump aesthetics. What makes Snapchat work is it is so single purpose - it opens to the camera and then you send. Period. Bubbly or blocky icons wouldn't matter. Then the network took hold - easy to find your friends but not your mom. Aesthetics (too fancy or too crude) can get in the way but I don't think they make or break. Look at early twitter for another good example.

without outing the celebrity, a very well-known and social media savvy person once told us "don't make YouTube look too slick, you want people to feel like they own it."

My own version of that was our UX should feel like there are fingerprints on it. Touchable.

This discussion reminds me of an old blogpost on Path: sexpigeon.tumblr.com
In any case, I'm not entirely sure that all these points are a bad thing: SnapChat suffers from a perception that's formed around it. Sexting, yes, but also, all of those in the tech world who run around talking about how great it is, and then using it not at all.
Poke is interesting: Like FB did to MySpace, it came in and brought a kind of legitimacy to the activity that helped it grow out from there. Facebook has the network of people that I want to talk to already, and frankly, entering mobile phone numbers is a PITA.

For the record, I don't think Snapchat suffers from any sort of perception that's formed around it. Nobody except tech pundits and journalists mention the "sexting" use case.

There are three issues here, market, design and graphic design.

Snapchat is well designed (its focused on a primary use case and pares that down well) but badly graphic designed. It shows well that UX should not necessarily be done by web designers.

There was a phase in the mid 90s where people deliberately copied the poor graphic design of Craigslist and poor design of MySpace, thinking that things needed to be dumbed down to be successful.

Quite apart from the fact that this cynical view will drive you mad - if doing you best to make something means deliberately not doing your best then you'll produce crap - MySpace was badly designed and badly graphic designed but Craigslist was just ignored graphic design but had well executed UX...

...There is a role for graphic design, but its secondary - Naive style graphic design like Snapchat is non threatening for a mass young audience, where something like Path's might be. But that's not a deal breaker, Facebook itself was far more sophisticated in terms of look than previous social networks and gained mass appeal.

Stylistic design is probably more important in the early days when the value in your product is less to do with its user base and you need to capture early adopters that define its character. Facebook's early adopters were often elite educated and older than Snapchat's and the style shows...

All of this is irrelevant, however, when it comes to the market. In the infinite supply, zero marginal cost world of digital economies, the finite resource is people's attention and people seem to assume there is infinite supply of attention for, say, Facebook to compete with Snapchat.

Although Snapchat doesn't have total market share that would normally signify it has won, it has the traction that matters. The attention that is in finite supply for Facebook to launch a competitive product is the attention of the early adopters that occupied the market niche in the eco-system that Snapchat filled...

Facebook can't compete alongside, it needs to capture users away from Snapchat or find a parallel eco-system with a different early adopter group. To do that it must have different features and for a product that is so incredible minimalist as Snapchat, different features = completely different product and therefore not a Snapchat competitor.

Facebook can do one of 3 things: look at the new opportunities in the ecosystem that Snapchat opened and do something different; wait for Snapchat to make an Instagram like mistake; wait for the eco-system to morph so that a new community is receptive to an improved product.

Both the graphic design and the design of Poke are neither a hindrance or an advantage here.

Apologies for the long post.

Om's take is good, though simplistic:

gigaom.com

Fracturing the Facebook audience between different features of the app that haven't developed their own thriving userbase means that (*ahem*) premature branching is unnecessary. IOW, splitting out photos into •Camera, and the inbox into Messenger makes sense, since there are groups on Facebook who only or primarily use Facebook for those features. On the contrary, even though you can't argue with Snapchat's popularity, people weren't "snapchatting" via pokes on Facebook (indeed, the app's namesake is relegated to a submenu on the profile), so a stand-alone app for "poking" (even despite its expanded repertoire of gestures in the app) seems to be premature.

One case where Facebook got this order of operations right was in launching the Like button for the web. Essentially they took a native, Facebook-bred action and generalized it for a broader context. In Poke's case, they're trying to take a non-native behavior and cause it to grow in a very different climate, in a patently different social soil composition (so-to-speak).

That said, the timing is opportunistic; it's unclear if the launch of Poke now means that Snapchat is uncool, or if, instead, this genre is just taking shape (see also: LINE).

Chris, your point about Facebook's Like is a good one. I agree that there's been some difficulty with platform not producing another Zynga: it should be troubling to FB. But Snapchat is different than Zynga: Snapchat represents not an application, but a form of messaging. FB views itself as a social utility. Core among that utility is photosharing, and communication with one's friends. While I haven't seen actual numbers, it seems to me that FB chat is the de facto IM product for anyone under the age of 20. Snapchat is different than say, 4sq, Quora or Instagram, because it's fundamentally a threat to this use case, as opposed to a different use case where FB would just like to capture the attention.

It's still early goings: FB Poke has been out less than a week. It's a holiday, people are busy, kids are missing face to face interactions that help products spread. Outside of the tech world, things work their way around a bit slower.
The thing FB might have done, actually, is figured out a better integration with the rest of FB's tools this age group is using.

0) Sorry I'm late!

1) Totally agree that sexting is not actually a primary use case, but is merely the one that the tech press loves to talk about.

2) MySpace was ugly not because they hired bad designers, but because they allowed their users to design their own spaces. Just as a photosharing app isn't ugly if the users post ugly photos, I think MySpace is tangential to the visual design of Poke and Snapchat.

3) I think Facebook built Poke as a separate app was because a) it was faster/easier and b) the models of privacy and permanence are so different from everything else on Facebook that integration would have been impossible. Camera and Messenger are separate for the sake of simplicity, but Poke couldn't have been built any other way.

4) Snapchat lets you add friends from Twitter, Facebook, and your address book. You can also enter your *own* phone number, without uploading your address book, and it will find people accordingly. You can also add users by username, but *not* by mobile number.

Does Facebook have an advantage because they have the social graph? The Internet consensus seems to be "Yes", but I'm unconvinced. People have shown a remarkable willingness to recreate their networks on new services, and I'm starting to see this behavior of "digital molting" as an advantage that new services have, over the old services that know all about the people that we used to be, but not so much about our present selves. This is the "fresh start" that Greg mentioned earlier.

4) but that's part of the advantage that Snapchat gives up when they made the app so ephemeral. I can use Snapchat for years, but the service won't "remember" anything about that.

I do think that the audience Snapchat is targeting is becoming more savvy about companies and their activities -- or "collective reputation". It almost doesn't matter what Facebook says about what it does with content on Poke; what matters is what young people *believe* Facebook does with Poke data. If they're not confident that Facebook's won't change the rules on them later, Poke is a nonstarter. That's why Instagram is an interesting case study: Facebook bought a product AND a network. With Poke, they built their own app, and [appear to] assume that their existing network expresses connections with the same semantics as Snapchat's network. I'm not so sure.

@ninakix: it's possible that Poke is aimed at the "Next Facebook Generation" -- those not really using it for communications yet because of parental surveillance, etc. The kids who are texting in class all day want something fast, lightweight, without a profile/wall they have to be paranoid about, or that has permanent content that their parents or other authorities in their lives could discover.

I do see your point on this front; impermanent digital content creation as a youth may lead to more permanent content production as an adult -- once your long term network has gelled through a more temporary adolescent identity construction period.

Late to the discussion and I see someone beat me to linking to that Sexpigeon post about Path, which I think is absolutely one of the most perceptive UI criticisms I've ever seen. Khoi Vinh has also written along similar lines in his "How Much Design is Too Much Design?" post:

subtraction.com

I think in these posts Tag and Khoi nail something that is very true of social software design: making a social app is a bit like designing a home/neighborhood for someone, and when that service is overdesigned it can sometimes feel like there's no breathing room for the user to make the place his or her own.

Visual Design is often over-credited for both successes and failures.

I'd break up the job of designing social software into the following hierarchy, from broad to narrow:

1) Product Design
2) Brand/Communication/Marketing Design
3) Experience Design (UX)
4) Visual Design (UI)

No product can be successful without #1. The disciplines that follow good product design enhance and can even kill or carry a good product. All four working together is magic.

Snapchat's design hits #1 on the nose, and does a pretty good job of the rest. I'd even say the visual design is on target with the kitchy, Lisa Frank-esque, Japanese Ameripop aesthetic. It would fit on the shelf of an Urban Outfitters app store, right alongside Loopcam (loopc.am).

Because design is at the focus of the industry right now, visual design can actually be used as marketing (as Path did), but that reach and relevance is limited. It brings product tourists, not necessarily the target users you are looking for.

And my thoughts on Poke:

Poke is a decent product (product design), but the brand seems off (marketing design). The name itself references a preexisting action that carries a lot of (negative?) baggage. I didn't want to poke before — why would I want to do it now?

As tech folks, it's easy to see it as a copy of Snapchat, but for FB users, in the context of their lives on FB, it's unclear where it fits (experience design). Snapchat benefits from a very narrow context. Poke is burdened by a suite of 10+ actions I am already doing in the FB ecosystem. If I were Facebook, I would just create a whole new stealth product under a different name and build from there.

Given all this, I'd say the visual design has little to do with it.

Agree with Keenan that "well designed" is a manifold attribute. I think Josh means "great visual design", and I wouldn't agree with that.

If we're drawing parallels to Path, I don't think their problem was that Path was "too beautiful to be inhabited" by people. A lot of people tried it out because it was so beautiful, but it didn't have much else to offer that would make it stick. Claiming Path's problem being too slick would be making the assumption that an "uglier" Path would have seen better adoption. I really don't think that's the case.

Maybe what Khoi refers to with "leaving no pixel unmanaged" is social designs made by people that don't understand the malleable medium of the web (err.. print people?).

A similar deal on Branch's end– we try to have tasteful and polished visual design, but I don't think this alone is responsible for some folks thinking everything on Branch has to be thoughtful. It's largely a branding issue.

We recruited a lot of high-profile early adopters, who in turn talked rocket science on Branch. People that had their initial experience with Branch during that time register us a place where they are welcome to read, not write. There's a mismatch between the brand we were pushing then, and what we are now.

The UI optimizes for medium-length, textual posts; and we make it a little awkward to post 4 times in a row for a reason. But I don't think these alone make the service "academic".

Completely agree with Keenan--especially the bit about visual design being over-credited as a success/failure factor. There's a fetishization of high concept UI in our industry right now that I think often temporarily blinds people to fundamental product and usability issues. A lot of apps that have made a big splash with the kind of glossy design, whiz bang interactions, and jetpack-ish gestural navigation that tech product types eat up don't seem to me to have aged as well as apps that employ less novel but often far more functional and established solutions to basic design problems. Making your app fun and attractive should definitely be a goal, but not at the expense of a clear mental model, discoverability, and simplicity in your UI.