App design · Social

Snipture

Photo sharing for people who travel, designed so that every kind of post looks like it was meant to be posted.

Snipture
Role

Sole designer

Team

Twenty developers

Scope

Full app UI and design system

Platform

iOS & Android

Snipture

The problem

One designer, twenty developers, and every post shape imaginable.

Snipture is a photo-sharing community for travellers, a niche inside a category where the incumbents are very, very good. Content is the entire product, so the interface has one job: make other people’s photographs look worth following.

The harder constraint was structural. I was the only designer against a team of twenty developers. At that ratio you cannot draw screens fast enough to keep everyone busy, and anything you hand over inconsistently gets built twenty different ways.

Snipture screens
Snipture screens

Content front and centre. The interface exists to make other people’s photos look worth following.

What I did

Three decisions the product hangs on.

01

Built a system, not a set of screens

Components and variants in Figma from day one, so the developers were assembling from a defined kit rather than interpreting individual mockups. That’s the only thing that makes a one-to-twenty ratio survivable, and it’s the reason the app stayed coherent as the team moved fast.

02

Designed for every post shape, not the ideal one

Social products die on the cases nobody mocked up: the portrait shot, the panorama, the four-photo dump, the caption with no photo at all, the post from a user with no followers. I worked through every content case so each one has a considered layout rather than a fallback.

03

Tested with real users while designing

Screens went out through InVision to a group testing on their own phones, so feedback arrived from real use rather than from a review meeting. Designs were adjusted as the project ran instead of at the end, when changing them costs the dev team a sprint.

Snipture screen
Snipture screen
Snipture screen
Snipture screen
Snipture screen
Snipture screen

Every post shape designed deliberately, so nothing falls back to a default layout.

Next project

Therapology

Start a project

Tell me what you’re building.

Send the Figma, live product, deck or even a rough message. I’ll tell you what I think it needs, whether I’m the right fit and roughly what it’ll cost.

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