A Snapchat Feature I’m Wishing Into Existence

I call it Angles.

I was toying with an app idea last summer that I realized would be much better as a feature of Snapchat (and later, when they copy it, Instagram) rather than its own thing. I thought I’d share it here. I call it Snapchat Angles.

This is how it’d work: when you take a snap, you’d be able to send it to a friend within Snapchat so that they can use it — to send to their friends and/or post to their story — and you’d be given a photo credit.

Maybe you’re bungee jumping, just arriving to a surprise birthday party your friends threw for you, or catching the perfect wave. These are significant moments in your life that you can’t capture yourself — but your friends can, from the convenience of their own phone. Snapchat Angles would give your Story an entirely new perspective.

These are events that aren’t necessarily interesting to the followers of the person originally capturing it, but they’re important to the followers of the subject of the event. (i.e. if I’m at a surprise party for my friend Ryan and record his reaction, many of my followers probably won’t care, because they don’t know him — but if I was able to send it to Ryan, and he could send it out to his followers — that’s a much more interested audience.)

Spectacles, and other hardware, like drones, could hit some of these use-cases eventually. But this is, at worst, a stopgap for that, and at best, a way to unlock a whole new dimension of personal storytelling that’s missing on Snapchat today.

This is how I see it working UX-wise:

1.) When you take a snap that you want to send as an Angle to someone else, you’ll tap a button on the screen that lets you add text, filters, and that stuff. Then, you’ll tap the blue arrow to continue on.

2.) On the next screen, where you normally select all the people (and Stories) you want to send the snap to, you’ll only be able to select one person. I thought about letting people send it out for several of their friends to use, but that could get old/boring for their collective audience to keep seeing the same snap. So, it’s limited to one.

3.) That person receives the snap on their messages screen. Some visual indicator marks that this is an Angle from a friend. When the person opens the snap, it automatically takes them to the screen where they can add filters, text, etc. before sending it out to their friends and Stories.

4.) The snap is sent, and the original photographer gets a little camera emoji photo credit in the upper left hand corner.

Anyway, that’s I was thinking. Do you think you’d use something like this? Let me know in the comments 👇 or tweet me @adamokane. My email is adamokane [at] gmail.com. Thanks for reading!