I think by most standards Snapchat’s UX would be judged pretty harshly. But it has a strong following because at its core it’s a power user app. Making features/actions discoverable takes up UI space that Snapchat almost entirely hides behind swipes or unlabeled buttons.

Snapchat’s philosophy is interesting because it’s designed for people who already know how to use Snapchat. It actually increased the social aspect a bit because most everyone probably has a story or two of being shown how to do something by someone else.

Mobile app discoverability is terrible, it’s not just you. I guess you’re just supposed to monkey around with it and hope you find new features.

This is the information age. Just Google it. I don't meant that flippantly. One of their best features, the Snap Map, is nigh undiscoverable. But after seeing someone else use it and being unable to figure out how to access it, Google was able to tell me. It's absolutely a failure of their UX but say, what's the discoverability of regexps with and without Google? Jira also suffers from the same problem - it's often far easier and far faster to just Google how to do something, rather than figure out eg which particular permissions system you want to be in, in order to be allowed to do a particular action.

Snapchat is very opaque, but greatly encourages experimentation. It’s got a learning curve, but fits a tremendous amount into a very sparse interface. In some ways it is like vim.

I’m not sure if that is praise or criticism.

Snapchat is a weird edge case because they've claimed they intentionally made some features difficult to find in the UX to encourage conversation about the app.

Don't know if it actually pays off positively for them, because I also find it confusing. But there's definitely been many moments of "Whoa, You can add a friend that way? You can do this by holding that button down?" etc

I foind Snapchat impossible too, but I get the feeling that to an extent its deliberate gatekeeping to keep us old folk out.

It is terrible.

But it's a nice counterargument to all the 'make the UI for the minimum viable user' thinking. It's a demonstration that if people care even a little bit, they can figure even such terrible, undiscoverable UI like Snapchat out.

I've been using snapchat since it came out, and it's definitely gotten worse like a lot of users have said. It used to be that you'd have your list of recent snaps and a camera—that's it.

Then they added stories and a contact list, and then they had to make money with the platform and things truly went to shit. That being said, it's not nearly as clunky as instagram's clone. I'd say regular users have gotten used to the death by thousand cuts at this point, like Latin evolving into vulgar Latin then later romance languages, and totally incomprehensible to someone who's just downloaded the app.

My understanding was that Snapchat is like that on purpose. Facebook became uncool with younger people because it became cool with older people. Snapchat want to avoid that, so the overuse of hidden gestures acts like a filter. I found it almost impenetrable (I'm over 30) and I had to ask my friends 18 year old sister how to use it.