The world according to IT and me

The Snapchatification of business apps

Paul Saunders, Solutions Director at Vistair Systems considers how to catch the attention of Generation Z, and coins a new word for it

The process of turning an activity or task into an app resembling Snapchat Software . Developers have resorted to Snapchatification in order to appeal to the next generation of users

I think I might have inadvertently coined a new term. I was talking to colleagues about challenges around building software for Generation Z users (or Zoomers as my daughter likes to be classified). This is the demographic cohort that follows Millennials including those born between 1997 and 2012. In short, people that are the same age as my kids. I described the next-phase of the further consumerization of business software as ‘Snapchatification’.

“You can’t just put ‘IFICATION’ after a random word and make it a thing” complained one of my coworkers, in horror. “I’m sure it’s already a thing.” I claimed. A quick Google search suggested it probably wasn’t a thing. How come? Maybe the elders of the dictionary don’t do social media. Maybe Snapchat is a bit too… 2019? I sense checked this with my offspring? Do kids still use Snapchat, or is there something around now that’s usurped it?

“Nope! It’s not even a case of 10% use something else. It’s 100% Snapchat. If you don’t have Snapchat, you have no social life and you basically don’t exist.” stated my 18 years old son with some authority. “It’s basically WhatsApp for Under-30s.” Gamification, Buzzfeedification, and Datafication are all real technology trends that have been influencing software development for some time, so I’m doubling down on Snapchatification.

What do I mean by this?

Disclaimer: I’ve never been a Snapchat user. In fact, even if I was, I think I’d struggle to keep up. It’s changed a lot in recent years with a really aggressive release cadence and constant interface overhauls. The core concept of Snapchat is that anything you send, a picture, a video or a message is only fleetingly available to recipients, before it is inaccessible. Supposedly the short-lived nature of content encourages a more natural flow of interaction… like talking. The key characteristics are that the app is hyper-intuitive, constantly innovating, and lightning fast to interact with.

Perhaps the best examples of where business apps have adopted a similar approach is in the fast-moving sector of Chat-ops. Enterprise software like Slack and Intercom allow for highly unstructured interactions, but under the hood enrich captured interactions with available metadata, enterprise integrations and machine learning.

Enterprise App ecosystems like Salesforce AppExchange, Atlassian Marketplace, and SAP Store are seeing many more independent, lighter-weight, highly atomized apps being developed, at lower cost with lower risk, and are taking their inspiration from supersimple consumer apps like Snapchat for acquiring data as quickly and painlessly as possible, in order to enrich or automate the enterprise landscape. I’ve already seen guerrilla adoption of this style of interaction where an electronic techlog app that I worked on would regularly see users uploading a photo of a troublesome lavatory compartment accompanied only by a poop emoji to report a cabin defect. How long before we see more of our business apps with a user interface more like a WhatsApp screen than a digital representation of paper form? We need to be ready for it. Or at least that’s how it is according to IT & Me!

PAUL SAUNDERS

Paul is a product visionary and geek who’s spent over 20 years in aerospace IT working with airlines, MROs, OEMs and software companies around the world. He believes that much business software sucks and is on a mission to redress that. Currently he’s leading a team of Product Managers, Product Specialists and Project Managers as Solutions Director at Vistair Systems. He spent the last three years outside of aerospace working in the Atlassian ecosystem and is currently banging on about bringing some of that SaaS, cloud and serverless tech into the aviation world.