Unrd: the new storytelling app that takes you inside someone else’s phone

Unrd takes the voyeurism of seeing someone else's messages and turns it into a suspense-filled story 
Daria Nepriakhina / Unsplash
Amelia Heathman19 October 2018

It’s 2.14pm on a Thursday afternoon and I have access to the phone of a woman who is about to go missing.

I can read through all her messages: about the party she is attending tonight with her friends and where they’re going to meet, that one of her friends has just arrived in Bali on holiday, and that she has a hospital appointment in six days’ time.

Opening up each message thread brings a sense of foreboding: what information contained in this conversation will shine some light on what is going to happen to her later?

However, these aren’t real messages I’m reading. This is the subject of Last Seen Online, an interactive story developed by Unrd. The new app, which was recently Apple’s App of the Day, is the hottest new thing in entertainment and wants to change the perception of mobile storytelling on its head.

Unrd was founded by Shib Hussain and Adam Lowe: two former university friends who worked in advertising before deciding to take a plunge into the world of digital storytelling. The duo were big fans of true crime series like Serial and Making a Murderer, but found that no one had cracked this idea of storytelling on mobile.

“Everything apes a previous medium,” Hussain tells the Standard. “Kindle is trying to be a book, but it’s a PDF. Netflix, you just turn your phone sideways and you’re watching TV but it’s not really designed for mobile. So we started thinking, what does a native mobile experience look like?”

Unrd's founders: Shib Hussain and Adam Lowe
Unrd

It turns out, when you’re designing something for mobile, you should start with the thing everyone uses their phones for: messaging. Hussain and Lowe decided to take the thrill of peaking over someone’s phone and reading their messages on the tube (don’t lie, you know you’ve done it too) and turn it into a story.

This story became ‘Last Seen Online’, Unrd’s flagship digital novel, and the story I’m currently working my way through.

“We thought, what happens if you had the phone of a missing girl and could read all her past messages, and also start to receive messages in-time and find out the real reason she went missing,” explains Lowe.

The story starts with a video of Amy walking down a road at 2.14am, and messaging someone on her phone, telling them to meet her. A car pulls up 10 minutes later and the duo walk off. You watch Amy drop her phone and the video ends.

Then the app pulls you into her phone, displaying her messages in a WhatsApp-like fashion. As the reader, I can look at all the available messages but I have to wait to receive messages in real-time for the story to develop.

Watching the story play out in real-time is an interesting one. Hussain and Lowe said they developed this feature as an antidote to the Netflix binge culture.

“We’re becoming used to being able to consume so much content back to back, you can watch a whole series in a weekend and then it’s gone,” says Lowe. “Whereas with this, we wanted to create a platform where you could go to bed and not know if the character is going to be alive or dead in the morning.”

Unrd's stories play out in the character's WhatsApp inbox
Unrd

‘Last Seen Online’ was a big hit for the duo, which paved the way for them to develop Unrd as an app. So far, there are four stories on the platform, with two new stories set to drop every month.

The current offering is a mixture of crime and thriller, though they’re hoping to introduce some romance stories to the mix soon. Hussain and Lowe are currently hiring new writers from different backgrounds including gaming, films and theatre, in order to keep up with demand.

They say the response has been great so far. They get messages from fans who are creating digital book clubs via WhatsApp to discuss the story, including theories about what has happened and what is on the cards next. One reader told them they felt that Amy in ‘Last Seen Online’ had become one of their friends as they had become so immersed in the experience.

As a way to satisfy these fans, Unrd has created a wealth of extra content including Instagram profiles of the characters, news websites, and even a fake number for a bar featured in one of the stories.

“It’s about making the story feel as realistic as possible so you’re entering the world the characters are living. It’s not just confined to the app but exists on the web too,” says Lowe.

Savvy readers can also pay to unlock keys to skip ahead in the story or unlock extra conversations. Hussain says this was a way to monetise the app, but not in a way that felt intrusive to the stories.

“Our whole thesis is that if we create a great experience and a great story but there’s an option for people to pay and learn more if they’re enjoying it, then they will.”

In a year when the major conversation in tech has been centred around people spending less time on their phones, it is interesting to see a company reclaiming this mobile space in a positive way.

“We were talking about how notifications can be entertainment, not just annoying,” says Hussain. “It’s about taking a behaviour that exists and reinventing it to be for storytelling.”

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