Snippet

Track Chosen: Track 3 - After the Fact

Experienced Division

Problem: Group chats are filled with memories that can sometimes be forgotten - like texts, memes, voice memos, photos, etc. There’s no way to reflect on those memories. This is especially true for college students who are in long distance friendships from all over the country/world. There’s no way to memoralize the small, in-between moments that define a relationship. 64.7% of college students report feeling lonely (Active Minds, 2024), and 57% of students experience this loneliness during the transition to college or other higher education (Sundqvist et al., 2023).

Solution: We chose to focus on college students, especially those who are leaving their home and their closest friends. The group chat is the main space where you mostly communicate with your long distance friends. Many Gen Z have group chats with friends from back home and 85% of US adults use text messaging multiple times per week (YouGov, 2026). We are making a digital scrapbook that lives within your groupchat to capture the small in-between moments that keeps those friendships fun and alive. The scrapbook lets people in the groupchat pull voice memos, reactions, photos, etc. after the experience has long passed.

Research Links:

Inspiration

When a chapter of your life ends, like a senior year, a trip, a season with your people, the memories don't live in photo albums anymore. They live in your group chat. But these memories scroll away, get buried, and disappear without much thought.

We built Snippet for college students who are far from home and suddenly realizing that the small, in-between moments, not the milestones, are the ones they actually miss. We wanted to give those moments somewhere to live.

What it does

Snippet is a digital scrapbook app that lives in group chats. Users can save photos, voice memos, and text snippets directly from their group chat and collaboratively arrange them into scrapbook pages with captions, doodles, and personal touches.

Each scrapbook belongs to a group, not a single person. Everyone contributes what they found meaningful. Pages can be organized by chapter or time period, and the app would provide a memory that surfaces randomly from any of the user's scrapbooks, which they can share back to their group chat.

How we built it

We designed Snippet end-to-end in Figma, building out three core user flows:

The library flow: browsing your scrapbooks, flipping between pages, and adding media from your camera roll The groupchat capture flow: saving content directly from group chats and putting it into a scrapbook from a simple push notification The home feed flow: an instagram-style home page that resurfaces old moments and nudges you to add to scrapbooks you've been away from

Challenges we ran into

The biggest design challenge was balancing low friction capture with intentional curation. A scrapbook only works if what's in it actually means something, but if saving something requires too many steps, people won't do it in the moment. We went through several iterations of the save flow to find the right middle ground: a notification-driven entry point that gets content onto the canvas in two taps, while still giving users full control over placement and captioning.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Designing a product that feels emotionally honest was harder than we expected, and we love that Snippet doesn't feel like a utility app. It feels like something you'd actually want to open. We are proud of the save flow where we can easily get content from a group chat onto a scrapbook with just two taps, the collaborative angle of all of your friends/family in the groupchat can contribute to one scrapbook, and that the app would surface memories that you may have forgotten pulled from your scrapbooks.

What we learned

We wanted to make the word copy be more friendly. The difference between "add photo" and "where should this photo go?" is the difference between a command and a friendly gesture.

We also found out that designing for long-distance relationships meant designing for absence. The user isn't in the same room as their friends. They can't make a new memory on a whim. We created the home feed nudges and the collaborative aspect to help with that.