Snap Design and Naked Mole-Rats

My 13-year old daughter just got back from DC and while we did receive a few texts from her during her three days away, how we actually stayed in touch was looking at her Snapchat story. If you have not had a chance to observe or participate in a teenager's usage of this tool, you may not appreciate the vigor that teens puts into the maintenance and grooming of their stories and snaps. I have had that opportunity so I totally appreciated the 8 different pictures and captions she curated into her daily story. It told us she had boarded the airplane and had a delay until 6:15 a.m., her friend napped during the delay, she safely landed AND used the bathroom at BWI, she or her friend had bruised their ankle sometime during the day, several girls had new shoes for the trip, they were somewhere outside at night with the Washington Monument behind them, and they ate some pizza before the end of the day. Similar snaps were shared for the other two days, though the teachers chaperoning were pretty strict about having phones out during actual tour events so the snaps were limited to traveling and evening free time.  My husband and I tried returning some snaps to her, but she, as expected, ignored them. When she returned, we talked a little about why she preferred Snapchat over Instagram (rarely used anymore) and how she uses Twitter to generally communicate with a broader virtual circle than what her Snapchat story will reach. This made me start thinking about how she would apply her preferences for using social media in the future when she is an adult.

I am spending a lot of time helping a client develop a mobile application, so of course anytime I can do research for that AND glean some knowledge about my daughter's social media habits, I take advantage of it. This morning I found myself reading a recent article from BuzzFeed's Ben Rosen recently got a lesson from his 13-year-old sister Brooke about her usage of Snapchat. Perfect. Even though it is his sister and my daughter which does indicate that his summary observations and mine are generational, I was amazed that 13-year old's could have developed a pattern for Snapchat usage that was so similar even though they don't know each other or live in the same area. [This offered me some non-scientific proof (oxymoron intended) that social media usage is driven from our history where we used social grooming as our primary means of establishing and reinforcing relationships. But this isn't about our primate history.] Some highlights and comparisons:

I would watch in awe as she flipped through her snaps, opening and responding to each one in less than a second with a quick selfie face. She answered all 40 of her friends' snaps in under a minute.

My daughter does exactly the same thing. Sometimes in a middle of conversation, she says "Just a second...", because she does try to be polite about being impolite, and quickly responded to the 10-20 snaps she had received over the last 10 minutes. It never fails to amaze me when she does this as it typically takes me 10 minutes to post 1 snap and 15 minutes if I am trying to figure out how to respond to a snap that someone sent me. Which leads me to the next observation...

I don’t really see what they send. I tap through so fast. It’s rapid fire.

That is my problem! I am taking time to look at the actual snap being sent to me! I can see that by not looking, I can save both the time of looking (maybe 2 seconds) AND the time it takes me to think up a more ironic snap (more like 5-6 minutes).

My daughter's new morning routine at breakfast is to ensure that her snap streaks are maintained.

You don’t know what a streak is? It’s when you send a snap to one of your friends on consecutive days. You have to make sure to respond every day with a snap or you break the streak.

Social Grooming

She has several going with specific friends and this seems very important to maintain. I would like to think this ability to maintain streaks is somehow associated with the care and grooming of her friendships, but that might be a
stretch. Though to be fair, when one particularly long streak (23 days) was broken due to her friend travelling to Australia and being on an airplane without wireless access, she did seem extremely disappointed.

These teens definitely know how to find the "tips and tricks" and that section of the article was not that surprising. Though even though I had googled some of this to for resaerch purposes only (really), I did learn something new that explains some previous snaps that perplexed me...

If you want to take a screenshot without your friend knowing, turn on airplane mode, take the screenshot, log out of the app immediately, turn off airplane mode, and then load the app back up.

That may not seem like anything big to most of you, but the fact that you cannot "save" a snap for later has always been one of the most interesting features since what it really drove the market to develop a whole bunch of apps that do this for you. Seriously, here is a recent article from Business Insider explaining to us adults how to do it! If you are wondering how teens learn to do this, it is not via google. According to my teen, she uses Instagram. There are accounts on Instagram dedicated to posting hacks on how to blow up Snapchat. Just like we used to do with the Zork cheats we hunted down by talking to the nerds in the basement of the Computer Science building.

So enough of that. What is my point? I think people believe that how my daughter and other teens use Snapchat will be the how they use other social media in the future. But that is a big stretch as adult behaviors mature. I do not know any adults who use Snapchat, or any other social media tool, to "be there in the moment" as a teen does. And I have seen their usage of a specific tool ebb and wane in the matter of a year. Instagram had the same characteristics a year ago, but now, my daughter limits her Instagram account usage and completely curates her pictures and comments. So it is not about the tool itself. I think it has way more to do with status and achieving that status. Social status has always and will always be a teen rite of passage. The tools used to achieve will change, but the objective is the same. Adults do not use social media this way. Of course we all have that friend who still posts that selfie Facebook at least once an hour (sometimes without his shirt, really?), but we have seen adults settle into reasonable connections that reflect that individual's social needs. Dunbar's Number suggests humans have a cognitive limit to the number of individuals one can maintain stable social relationships with around 150 others.

I can definitely attest to this limit as I have an hour on my calendar to curate my LinkedIn network because I am suddenly being overwhelmed by the ability for someone I met for 5 minutes at a conference 6 years ago to weigh in my skills to Program Manage or Leadership.  The idea of socializing within your "virtual circle" takes on a different meaning and the bigger it gets, the change in tool features you need.

What I am interested in is as a Digital Transformation professional is how to incorporate this ever changing social status into a digital strategy that serves a wide age range. Pew Research tells us that 74% of online adults use a social networking site. If you are targeting teens or teens moving into adulthood, then ensure that the ability to enable social status their friends exists. But if you are designing for an experience tied to real business outcomes, then you are going to need to find a balance of outcomes-based features and features that let your teens build a status they feel good about. And you will need to prepared to shift that balance as your user base shifts demographics. Don't overload on one or the other if you are trying to attract a larger span of ages. Don't ignore the obvious sticky features for teens, but don't let your teens overwhelm those of us who want to stick with the basics, and do those basics really well. Finally, don't forget the socioeconomic differences in features of different apps. Snapchat is a data usage HOG. Almost all of my daughter's limited 1 GB data usage (yes, we are those horrible parents restricting data on their poor poor teens), is allocated to Snapchat. Snapchat more likely to be used most often by wealthier teens; Facebook most popular among lower income youth.

Research shows that usage of social media is here to stay, but the features in that media shift around and I would argue are as elusive as trying to understand why responding to a tweet with a picture of yourself as a naked mole-rat makes any sense.

new year, new me pic.twitter.com/M6rZFOAUiD

— natalie (@nataliebramer) January 2, 2016

And don't worry, your teens will be moving on from Snapchat to Tinder soon!