App Review | Facet
As a designer at SnapMobile, I pretty much live and breath mobile apps. I try to occasionally download random apps to check out their user experience, and every now and then I come across an exceptional one. Facet is an app where you can upload short videos (much like Vine), but instead of being funny, these videos are supposed to try to capture an experience. For example, if I eat a meal at a beachfront restaurant in Hawaii, I can record a bunch of clips and then splice them together to make a 15 second video that captures the whole experience. Users can then view the video, add an emoji reaction, and pin the experience to a board. That’s the overview, now let’s get into the details.
Overall Idea: A-
Facet feels like a Vine and Flipbook lovechild. While it doesn’t do anything revolutionary, the app is just highly engaging, especially for people like me who enjoy traveling. When you watch a well-composed video experience, you get a small taste of what it was like to be there and that’s enough to spark an interest in getting the full experience. It also just has a weird way of making you feel good: I think it’s impossible to watch videos in the Dancing category and not smile as people dance in all kinds of cultural environments. If you do like to travel, Facet makes it easy to pin videos to boards so you can plan a whole trip around certain experiences.
User Experience: B
Facet pretty much does the bare minimum as far as onboarding a new user. At first, I was a bit confused about what I was supposed to do and how to navigate different videos. I was also expecting to hear audio along with videos and looked around for the sound option before realizing the videos are supposed to be silent. On the bright side, once I poked around a bit and got my bearings, the app became very easy to use and navigation started to feel intuitive. Onboarding can be tricky for designers: we want to make sure the user knows about important functionality, but at the same time, discovering things on your own can be highly rewarding. Facet does a good job of finding a happy medium.
User Interface: A+
I love the UI in Facet. I’m always a fan of minimal UIs, especially for apps like Facet that focus on user-generated content. While the app occasionally strays from convention (like pressing the bottom half of the screen to move to the next video and the top half to go back to the previous), the paradigms start to feel intuitive in no time at all. I can’t say the same for apps like Snapchat… To explore different categories, Facet uses these picture bubbles that fade in and out of your screen as you swipe around. It definitely reminds me of the Apple Watch home screen, and I feel like it works very well for this app.
Pulling It All Together…
To summarize, I think this app is a must-have for anyone who likes to travel. They say people are spending less on products and more on experiences, so if that is truly the case, Facet should become a household name pretty soon.
Originally published on September 28, 2016.
Originally published at blog.snapmobile.io on September 28, 2016.
