It's been a few months since I've visited Snap.com (consciously, at any rate), and I thought I would check to see how things are progressing.

Unfortunately, things still seem sluggish. I appreciate that you are working on improving the feel of the site, but I'm wondering if it is technically possible to get a nice "crisp" experience. I can't answer that question, but I hope you are asking it.

On a somewhat-connected-but-not-really-connected point, I still have to wonder about the visual preview "thing." The more I think about it, the nice thing about visual preview is that it makes it easier to re-identify a website that you already have in mind. Here's the scenario: I visit website X; I like it, think it's neat, but forget to bookmark it; later on, I want to visit it again but I can't remember exactly how I got there — I remember a few key words, but ordinary "pure text" search produces too many options to dig through. In this scenario, visual preview works because I can quickly scan the list of sites for what looks familiar.

The problem is that if I am initially searching sites — identifying, rather than re-identifying — I don't see how the visual preview helps. Is the idea that if I can see the initial page it will somehow help me to decide if the page is somehow legitimate, relevant to my search, looks nice, or …? I'm worried that the motivation behind the visual thing is simply that it's "different" or "cool," and that it hasn't been thought out. So the questions are: where does the visual preview pay off, where should it be paying off, and do you have any evidence that it does pay off? I would hate to think that your entire project is based on the tastes and intuitions of a bunch of computer geeks and business-types. Where's the science? =]

At any rate, and to return to my not-really-connected point, if we are in the scenario where I am trying to re-identify a website, it might be more feasible to have your search merely load thumbnails of websites. For instance, I type "" and it shows me a bunch of thumbnails so I can scan for familiar features: the general color, color patterns, the basic layout, etc. Moreover, if you wanted to pair the text and visual thing, why not just include a thumbnail image of the site with the ordinary text search? This would let the user catch the quick visual features of the website, and also allow you to speed up the user's search experience (again, because the images would be much smaller).

I think the important question you need to ask (and answer) is what purpose does the visual preview serve. If the purpose of the visual preview is to give people a quick sense of the page, then why can't the picture be significantly smaller? It sounds like an interesting psychological question: what do people use the visual preview for? If it's to get an immediate color or pattern "burst," then you should be able to significantly reduce the size of the image and speed up the page. Or, if they are using the visual preview for its content, that would be interesting too (and perhaps it would also count as some kind of justification for your approach).

Best,
Mikel