How Netflix and Snapchat Break UX Design Principles
Breaking the UX principle is fine? Well, of course not! Somehow Netflix and Snapchat have done this. But what if it’s for a good cause? I was the one who was told to never play with UX principles but then these two ground-breaking platforms came into existence. This article will reveal how Netflix and Snapchat have broken the rules for good causes. How? Let’s know!
The Beginning
With the rapid advancements in the digital era, it has become crucial to understand User Experience (UX) principles and practices. These principles help keep the procedure aligned while also creating designs that people fall in love with.
The guiding principles of great design are comparable to cooking instructions. Nevertheless, it is wise to periodically stray from these UX guidelines.
At the beginning of the internet, all the websites and applications had poor experiences. They featured perplexing color schemes and cluttered home pages. However, as time passed, people moved toward digital inventions and found some amazing ways to play with different designs and colors.
This way, the user’s experience and how easily the user can use the app or website also came into focus. To improve the user experience, designers adopted a set of guiding principles.
Breaking Design Principles Purposely
Over time, I haven’t seen any designer creating a website against all the principles that have turned out to be a good idea. However, some well-known companies — Netflix and Snapchat have dared to disobey common UX principles. Thus, let’s delve deeper to learn how Netflix and Snapchat purposely break UX guidelines to accomplish specific goals.
Netflix
Netflix usually gets its things right from a user experience perspective. However, still, it has some features that have left its users wavering — the famous auto-play feature.
Auto-Play Feature
When a user hovers over a thumbnail on Netflix, the previews automatically start playing. Numerous people found this function to be annoying, and they expressed their complaints in innumerable articles, tweets, and blog entries.
However, despite being available for 4 years, the platform has only just decided to allow viewers to actively opt out in 2020 if they truly don’t want it.
Preview Sound
There was one more thing that caught me, which was additional music playing in addition to the preview sound when the trailers were shown. The soundtrack matches the spirit of what the preview trailers depict. Screeching noises are usually used in horror films, bouncy music for comedies, and sluggish violins in tragedies. Even though it might seem insignificant, this feature is vital to the user experience and makes a significant difference!
What these trailers do is convey experience and feel to the audience. These previews combine audio cues and visuals to communicate feelings to the users, without giving any written description.
Netflix has gotten positive feedback on both of these features and enhanced the number of time users spent on the platform instead of having them leave after browsing through a few titles.
Snapchat
Snapchat has a fairly complex user interface for an app with 238 million daily users. They have decided to not use universal icons. Without any assistance from Snapchat, the navigation is incredibly difficult and the majority of elements lack labels. Even the screen where users find fresh material has a little bit of a daunting feel about it.
Yet it is having been observed that UX decisions didn’t negatively affect the platform. In this digital age, it is quite common that if a user is presented with a complex user experience, they don’t allow even a second chance to the app. But it never happened with Snapchat, the platform experienced huge success due to its UX design.
Grownups Are Out
Snapchat has a majority of teens. Consequently, they made the user interface complex to make it difficult for adults to comprehend. And most adults don’t even bother to put up the effort of learning the use of this app.
The entire content is enclosed with strict limitations when it comes to editing. The app has a feature of sharing content privately with one-click seen, which usually teens like the most.
People Talk About It
Sometimes, teenagers also find the user interfaces challenging, however, it becomes one way of looking cool and fitting in with other peers. Every time, when a new filter or feature is added to the app, it raises the usage rate and awareness.
The Gamification Component
Snapchat designed several features difficult to use intuitively because it understood the psychology of its users. Users feel rewarded if they spend more time on the platform investigating because only then do they find these features.
For instance, the score is displayed under the user’s name when they visit their Snapchat profile. It essentially shows how much time users spend on the app and how engaged they are with it (by sending and receiving photos). For Snapchat, this fantastic gamification approach has been effective.
In a Nutshell
These big platforms have defied UX principles for a reason which I just discussed, and evidently, they have made their target audience a priority by providing what actually they need.
Undoubtedly, designing products that match the users’ needs can help brands enhance their app’s usability. This is what these platforms are doing efficiently! Thus, if you need assistance with your app’s user interface UX, you can always consider Codment as your ideal partner.