AI-picked albums to Insta-highlights: How we reminisce in today's era?
Stories, first introduced in Snapchat, has been re-purposed into a variety of use-cases. It is re-interpreted to preview movies on Netflix, creator updates on YouTube, and as simply, Stories, on everything Facebook owns. The last was Google Photos getting ‘Memories’. It only seems a delay that Google took so long to be convinced that the ‘Stories UI’ is the most preferred way for presenting collections of Photos. ‘Memories’ is a permanently existing AI-picked collection of photos/video-clips in a Snapchat Story format, very similar to Insta-highlights. It is obviously editable by the user and it’s purpose is to reminisce.
Snapchat Memories : The less-cluttered Gallery
Before I get to Google Photos Memories, I must preface the story with Snapchat Memories. On Snapchat, Users were saving content locally as they were posting ephemeral Stories and Messages. So with ‘Memories’ folks at Snapchat basically remarked: “so be it.” It allowed people to save within the App itself instead of the local storage. It eventually adds to a Snapchat Gallery.
Snapchat opens into the Camera. They ingeniously tweaked clicking on a smartphone for a sharing platform. On a conventional camera app, the default for a click is “Saved to Gallery”. On Snapchat, the default is a buffer during which the user must choose to Discard, Save, or Share. As a result of this design, the gallery remains mostly void of redundant pictures and has only moments worth sharing or saving, left with mostly — Highlights.
Snapchat can actually be a better alternative to conventional Camera app. Now, this filtering is mostly done by virtue of “What do you wish to share?” It’s a question irrelevant to Memories in Google Photos. But the user behavior is of interest to us, as a filtering behavior is what Google is aiming at, to clean our landfill of photos. Google Photos with it’s story-esque Memories aims to present most high signal-to-noise ratio space for everything your camera can capture. Pedantically, it’s a collection of user information by hardware.
Ephemeral to Permanence : Insta-Highlights
Insta-highlights is quite different from Snapchat Memories. Instagram automatically retains in cloud everything you post in your stories, and then later allows you to create Story-like collections called Highlights’ pinned to the top of your profile.
The organisations based on meta-data like Date, Locations and People has been automatically done for ages, but what Insta-highlights achieves is users choosing to package around more subjective themes. Users are primed to create these highlights to ‘save’ content on Stories from their inevitable fate. One might argue as to the value of these permanent highlights, when one can simply create permanent posts. But the content posted originally on Stories is different and posted with a default intention of not saving. "Not Saving" is where the story of Snapchat begins.
Re-configure User Behavior for Digital Photography
Choosing to click a picture unconsciously burdens the user with the question: “Do I wish to preserve this?” This is a relic from the age of film photography where the technology limitations commanded high cost per picture. And this picture, once captured, permanently occupied it’s atoms in an individual’s life. But atoms to bits changed everything. The idea of not saving pictures and videos you capture was culturally a novel one, but digitally a obvious one. This is what Snapchat's ephemeral messaging ingeniously manifested.
Zero cost of capturing and storing pictures meant you can click pictures without having to own a bad picture. But the user mindset is hard to change. At some point of time, you must have remarked several times to your friends while randomly clicking a picture on your phone: “Don’t worry, we can just delete if not good.” Snapchat’s ephemeral messaging helped the users unlearn that notion.
Constraining that photos would be purged the moment it’s shared and seen, meant pictures are detached from the “preservation” attribute. This lowered the notional barrier to what gets captured. The upside is now “pictures” are literally being substituted for words, and people are capturing pictures in all sorts of new contexts. The flip-side is your phone galleries are dominated by pictures with negligible shelf life — the very thing Google Photos intends to clean up.
Enter the MVP of all Social Media today: Stories.
Stories : A Star is Born
It’s 2015. At launch, Snapchat stories merely seemed like a “Status Update” variation for pictures. Snapchat Stories held the place occupied by Status Updates on WhatsApp THEN. You would share updates of your day with everyone, and it would cease to exist in 24 Hours. Content that’s posted, seen once and irrelevant the next day. But what it was, and as it turned out to be, is a distant cousin of a genre taking over YouTube: the Vlog.
Stories is essentially a Micro-Vlog
A vlog when broken down to it’s bare essentials is a chronological montage of events from a person’s day, strung together in an “Edited” package.
This is similar to Stories which is essentially a chronological collection of content lasting a day. The core-difference is that it’s not pre-packaged by a user into an edited video. The content grows as it’s captured. It’s, as I like to define it as, a form of Micro-Vlogging. It’s the Tweet to a Blog. The people sharing are not necessarily filmmakers but end users. For them and all, Snapchat took a number of design decisions to create the most versatile UI in Media today.
The Design Decisions to Stories
Designing stories is essentially designing a vlogging tool for end users. The first major design decision is constraining the content orientation to Vertical by default. It’s the natural way to hold the smartphone and Snapchat made it the norm, eliminating one more choice: turning the phone sideways. It is another choice eliminated, requiring the users to be even less intentional while posting. And be consumed rapidly without turning your phone around. This design decision works on the metric that separates the end users and professionals in any field: how intentional one is with their creation.
The next design decision is story (essentially a video) divided into 10-sec segments. Regardless of whether you capture a 10 sec clip or longer, it gets “cuts” after every 10-sec. The person creating doesn’t edit the content. And the consumer gets to cut-to next segments as he liked. The Story UI integrates content as the user posts, and differentiates content as various consumers choose to consume.
Now with the choice of orientation, work of editing and preservation attribute eliminated, it distills the barrier down to the question: “Do I want to share with everyone?”
Snapchat opens into the Camera. They ingeniously tweaked clicking on a smartphone for a sharing platform.
With Stories, users got habituated to capturing and publishing the truly fleeting moments of life.
Permanence, an attribute added back to Stories at a later time leads to Insta-Highlights.
Insta-Stories is obviously a rip-off of Snapchat stories, and it too eliminates the “Do I wanna preserve this?” question at the moment of capturing. Insta-highlights just lets you answer that question in a later moment. This published-and-saved media is borne from a very different dynamic than the saved-media that goes into Google Photos. But by being published first, it achieves something crucial for reminscing: It gets the user to do Digital ScrapBooking.
Insta-highlights is a Digital Scrapbook
When we share content on Stories, we overlay it with text and other elements to often establish context, to make it comprehensible to everyone. The context is essential information for everyone at the time of posting, and then essential for you weeks later at the time of reminiscing. The Scrapbook metaphor applies and is almost surreal.
One might take Stories content and give it a permanent place in an Instagram post. But as we’ve established above, content captured in stories is fundamentally of a different nature than posts. Additionally Insta-highlights offers is ease of use allowing you to port content as is, requiring you to simply re-package it. I would further argue that it’s easier to ‘Tap-to-Next’ to consume, which is rapid and effortless compared to swiping across on an Instagram post carousel.
The Stories UI integrates, and differentiates content dynamically. Insta-highlights simply allows the user to re-package, differentiate and integrate content later, into a ‘Digital Scrapbook.’ An Insta-highlight captures my trip to London a year ago, in a more coherent narrative than the album in Google Photos. Ever since, I have revisited Insta-highlights of the London trip much more than the corresponding album in Google Photos. Most of my friends and family have only ever seen the Insta-highlight. My reminscing has been radically changed by Insta-Highlights, since the days of photo galleries and Google Photos.
Should Google Camera & Photos app be re-designed in the image of Insta-Highlights?
The notion of “sharing with everyone” stimulates the user to overlay the context at the moment of capturing — scrapbooking. It evolving into a Digital Scrapbook is a long-term reward. But we humans are inherently bad at keeping in mind of long-term rewards. In the short term, we might hardly put the effort in the short-window of it being captured, yet this is what Google wished we did to create the ideal form of Stories-esque highlights in the Photos app.
The obvious caveat with Insta-highlights is that it only scrapbooks content by virtue of sharing with everyone. Hence, as of now, the content within the Photos ‘Stories’ will be the most intimate but not the most well documented. But I sense that as people are starting to learn and appreciate this entire dynamic from Stories to Insta-Highlights, a camera app that allows this for private photos might on the cards.
In conclusion…
Creating Stories caused the user to capture their lives with low cognitive load and a more abundant manner. The upper bound of 10-sec, similar to 280 character on Twitter, offers the thinnest unit for it to be repackaged and re-organized. Video can carry any experience, any combination of content.
Stories UI is well-received as THE WAY users wish to consume collections of photo/videos content on smartphones. Google acknowledges this after trying so many ways to organize media over the years. Stories are essentially videos, the most high-bandwidth and flexible medium of all. It’s the scrap-booking possible thence that everybody, and especially Google, need to stimulate the users to do.