On Unfiltered users get a random throwback from their camera roll every day, which they can swap with their friends to see their respective throwback of the day.

After seeing new social apps such as Poparazzi, Locket and BeReal growing, I wanted to give a shot at a social photo product. In the end, “a picture's worth a thousand words” and an audio message is worth only so many over a long period of time. The density of information is much higher in visual media formats than auditory ones. It’s easier to absorb a lot of context from a photo than it is from an audio message. 

The take-away from Poparazzi's, Locket's and BeReal's growth was that young people were receptive to a close friends and authentic photo sharing product. These apps’ retention and growth tactics aside, young people were installing these apps.

All of these apps were preaching a more authentic photo sharing experience, and all found clever consumer narrative and product hooks to get people to take new photos. Philosophically speaking though, most people live their most authentic and true selves outside of the moments that they ‘create photos’ in these apps. They live their authentic and true selves in the real world, which if they end up capturing it, they do using the native iPhone camera.

This is when I wondered: could we design a photo sharing experience on top of the native camera roll? 

• The barrier to create would practically be 0 because the photos are taken already

• The value of the photos is incredibly high because these were photos people chose to take to capture a moment organically, no app was asking them to do so.

• People barely go through their camera roll’s photos because there are so many!

To test the valuableness of camera roll content and at the same time introduce a cheeky consumer social hook, I thought it would be worthwhile to give people a completely random photo from their camera roll every day.

Working with peoples entire camera roll it was clear from the start that privacy had to be baked into the core product loop.

This is where two key design decisions were made:

1.) The social graph had to be tailored on 1-1 interactions. Giving people control whom they share their daily throwback photo with on a per-friend basis. “For your eyes only”

2.) Give-to-get: for people to see their friend’s throwback they had to show them theirs. “Fair-trade”

This ended up feeling gamified and perfect for a consumer social product. Since we were now in the business of throwbacks and memories, it felt suitable to design and habituate users around a daily habit of swapping. Giving folks a daily notification when their throwback was ready. A simple ritual that’s driven by anticipation and positive-surprise.

We released Unfiltered and quickly gathered 10,000 daily active users. A logical next step was supporting Live Photos and short-form videos. It made sense to support Live Photos given we built the experience on top of the native camera roll and could take advantage of native technologies.

The key insight post-release was that the camera roll is not just a treasure trove of content from a zero friction to create POV, but more importantly, the camera roll has quietly captured our true social network. The people and places we naturally choose to capture and end up in our camera rolls, are the people we spend most of our time with and the places we hang out at the most. Now this is a big social opportunity if we can unlock that social network through a low-friction photo sharing experience.

Unfiltered was #3 in App Stores in Europe and has ~10,000 Daily Active Users. The app’s core mechanic resulted in a 58% Day 60 retention. In total over 7,000,000 photos have been shared and Unfiltered has 70,000 downloads.