Snapchat: Content Collection — Marguerite Castañeda

Marguerite Castañeda

In an effort to create a premium collection of one-subject content around the 2020 election the editorial team, design, and product created a dedicated space on the 5th page of the app.

Users have never encountered a space like this in the the app before and our goal was to be able to get click-in, in addition to increasing the time spent of the stories featured within the content collection.

The content collection sat on the fifth page. This was often called the “secret page” as there was no indicator that it existed. The first three screenshots are from after we implemented a navigation bar to guide our users, but as you can see on the fourth and fifth screenshot, there was no indication on how to navigate.

First attempt

After being briefed on the project and its goals, I worked with design to create mockups for National Voter Registration day. While we knew that emotive faces worked best on the Discover feed, these didn’t feel premium and looked forced. You can also see a “CC” pill in the upper-right corner on the left screenshot which was supposed to indicate the “Content collection”, which meant nothing to the user.

After some feedback…

I provided design with feedback to create something that was in line with external marketing efforts around the important date and to lose the faces in order for the UX to look premium. We worked on some content below the bigger national voter registration day which we hoped would act like a UI copy but soon learned that it would conflict with coded copy already in place. We touched base with product and design and edited the coded copy and the image on the right was our final go-live product.

Presidential debate

We went with caricatures of Biden and Trump so we could include their faces but not have to stitch photography together in a forced way. This also allowed us to be more playful, which is on the nose for Snapchat. Our final mock up included a call to action at the bottom right: “Tap For More”. This was a request from the Product team. We were reluctant to do this, it felt too on the nose and we thought we did enough with the hard coded copy and “Biden vs. Trump” but in reality our users needed direction on what to do.

With the addition of the CTA, we saw time spent go way up for the channels included in the content collection.

This is a great example of a time where i advocated for content best practices in writing but wasn’t open to UX best practices. By the end of this project, engagement and reach were too low to make this a sustainable product. I learned that we not only have to set up clear expectations, we have to give clear instructions on what to do with those expectations.