Snippet: Piece Together Your Writing
Janice Ji
Writing is rarely a linear process. As a student, I have always found it difficult to work through extensive projects, as even starting feels stressful and burdensome. To address the ubiquitous fear of a blank page, I conceptualized Snippet, a speculative web app aimed to make the writing process feel more approachable yet multifaceted.
Snippet’s approach is simple, allowing one to build up a project in pieces. However, unlike other apps that may limit users to a couple predefined ways of working, Snippet lets users see five views of their notes, which can be customized using plug-ins. While new users start with basic views to ease them into the program, their writing can be reorganized visually, turning it into paths guiding toward a goal or trees that grow based on complexity. This provides multiple possibilities to see the same content from various perspectives, encouraging others to make sense of their work in new ways and also allowing for more explorative approaches to writing.
To support this, Snippet’s user interface is designed to be quiet and simple—employing light tones and clean lines—to allow for an intuitive and focused writing experience. Snippet also includes Snippy, an AI character that serves as a friendly onboarding guide and assistant to help the workspace feel more comforting and to alleviate the stress of approaching a writing project—and maybe even add some unexpected fun to the process.