#15 - Text, Audio, Video: Pick 2, Discard 1.

I’m tired and hungover, waiting for my red-eye home to Boston from Las Vegas. I’m in no state to write this article, but I’ve been thinking about this all weekend.

If you’re in a rush, scroll to the end for the key takeaway.

My friends and I are building the first social media app that people are actually proud to have on their phones.

We’re still in the early innings, and we need to figure out what the user interface for this app is going to look like. Fast.

After several days of brainstorming (with little to show for it), I finally asked myself the same question I asked myself at my girlfriend’s thanksgiving when I stood up for a 4th serving of turkey stuffing:

“Am I being too greedy?”

I want this app to do so many things.

I want it to support the creation and consumption of text, audio, and video content. And I don’t want any of these three modalities to feel like second-class citizens within the app.

Without getting into specifics, we expect most messages users send back and forth to be text. But user-created videos are the central focus of the app. Though what really matters is the audio within the videos, so it would be nice if the app supported background playback of the audio, like a music player…

The only user interface I can visualize that meets those constraints looks like a chimera of TikTok, Spotify and WhatsApp. That’s just not it.

It begs the question: is it even possible to create a UI that makes text, audio and video all feel like natural inputs and outputs?

Let’s audit the field. What modalities do today’s biggest platforms support?

The inviolable rule appears to be the following: Well-designed apps un-apologetically tailor their UI’s around a single modality, supporting a secondary modality around the margins.

TikTok’s UI is optimized entirely around creating and consuming vertical video, while supporting text (i.e. comments) around the margins. Twitter’s UI is the reverse, optimized entirely around creating and consuming short-form text content while supporting video/images as a second-class citizen.

Any attempt to support a third modality is dead on arrival. The Spotify comments section is always empty, no one remembers Twitter’s “Audio Tweets” feature, and I’ve never pressed play on a Substack video.

YouTube, knowing better, launched a separate app “YouTube Music” instead of trying to bundle it into their main “YouTube” app. That way they could create an audio-first UI.

This rule appears to hold true even for simple apps. iMessage is great for text, passable for video, and painful for audio. Have you ever listened to a voice note? It sucks.

Here’s the thought I’m bringing back to my team as we aim to create the first honest-to-god good social media app:

Let’s not be greedy. Let’s make one modality the focal point, let’s support a second modality around the margins, and let’s ignore the siren calls of the one that remains.

Updates to come to soon.

Key Takeaway

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See you next week — Rayhan

P.S. I work at a company developing humanoid robots. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, you’ll love this article profiling the space.