Keepsake

Keepsake is a family memory collecting application. It helps users to record the stories of their family members in a meaning way through a mix of audio, photos, and text.

This was a passion project completed over the course of a year, outside of work hours, by a team of five people passionate about finding a way to help users capture their family stories.

Year

2020-2021

Project Type

UI/UX Design, Brand Identity

Role

UX/UI Designer

Team

Eastina Zhang, Jenny Li, Rai Medeiros, David Hernandez

Overview

Highlighting and organizing family memories in a meaningful way

Keepsake is a mobile application that allows users to thoughtful collect and curate family stories and keep the memories of their family members alive. We created Keepsake for family historians, those who are actively seeking out and gathering stories about their family members.

Problem

Historian types are consistently gathering information and artifacts but have no way to easily gather them in one place and display them in a thoughtful manner. They often feel overwhelmed with the amount of content to curate and can't find digital scrapbooking tools that feel easy to use and are family story centered.

Solution

Keepsake creates a centralized place for users to put their content and provides them with different ways to curate that content. Product features including adding family profiles that can be attached to stories, a timeline story view, digital story-building, and question inspiration cards.

My Role/Responsibilities

UX research, UI design, Brand Identity

Individual contributions: wireframing and prototyping the onboarding, profile creation, and story creation sections of the application.

Discover

Family story collection

Initial research focused on better understanding user’s needs related to family story collection and their existing process or workarounds for different situations.

Focus Areas
01

How do people currently gather and record stories?

02

What existing products exist to help users collect stories?

03

What are users current pain points with existing products?

04

Which functions/features are essential to the story collection process?

User Interviews

A series of in-depth interviews were conducted on 14 users to further identify pain points, frustrations, needs, and desires with existing products to determine how Keepsake could improve the family story gathering experience.

Historian types are consistently gathering information and artifacts but have no way to easily gather them in one place and display them in a thoughtful manner. Our users used a variety of different methods to collect family stories, yet they had no centralized location to gather these various pieces of information. Methods of collection included sending photos in a family group chat, audio recordings, written records, digital photo albums, physical photo albums, social media accounts.
Key Takeaways
01

Users often feel overwhelmed with the amount of content they have to curate

02

Tools products in the market lack desirable features and feel impersonal

03

Users don't know how to organize the information that they have

04

Users have no centralized location to put all the information they are gathering

05

Users value the ability to have creative freedom in their story curation process

06

Users sometimes struggled with how to bring up certain topics and questions

Define

Carving out a niche in a saturated market

After conducting user interviews, all the participants responses were synthesized to identity themes, opportunities, and features that Keepsake could focus and improve upon.

Interview Synthesis
Affinity Map

We conducted affinity mapping to identify high level themes and group similar insights gained from the user interviews.

Something unexpected we found during this stage was an hesitancy to approach and bring up certain topics with family members. While our users were all eager to connect with their family members and collect family stories, family relationships could be complicated and this could cause hesitancy to ask certain questions.

Ideate

Creating a seamless experience

To kick-off the design process, we started with building out a user flow and then sketched out initial screen designs. A low fidelity prototype was then created for initial user testing.

User Flow

The primary user flow is the process of signing up, adding family profiles, creating a story, and viewing stories on a timeline.

Sketches

Rough sketches were done to get my initial thoughts on paper and brainstorm new ideas for specific UI elements.

Low-Fidelity Prototypes

Using the feedback and insights gained from research, analysis and sketching, a low-fidelity prototype was created to begin user testing.

User Testing

User testing was conducted to determine where improvements could be made and identify new ideas to satisfy user expectations, needs, and desires.

Pain Points
01

During the family member profile creation stage, users felt that often they might know the age that their family member was when a story happened, but they wouldn't be sure of the specific year.

02

But we heard the onboarding process was too long and caused a high barrier of entry, especially if users didn't have content or family member info on hand.

03

On the timeline page, all family posts were featured on one timeline. Users felt it was an overwhelming amount of content and worried about not being able to find certain stories that they would want to look back on.

New Ideas
01

I designed a UI that allows users, after they attach a profile to a story, to either input dates or family member ages to then calculate and show the other.

02

We drastically cut down our onboarding flow including removing intro explanation screens, and only asking users for personal details before putting them into the timeline page. Because the timeline is empty before users enter any content, I also included small guidance notes on areas of the app they can explore.

03

We decided to create different timeline views including a zoom out mode to show a minimized overview of all stories. We also allowed filtering by family member in case users want to see all the stories that a particular person is in.

Design

A focus on warmth

In discussing what Keepsake's branding should be our team aligned on the following characteristics for the app: Meaningful, Personal, Warm, and Treasured.

We decided to go with a primary color dark green to evoke a sense of both growth and security. For our highlight colors we went with warmer tones of red and yellow which aligned with some of the feelings we wanted people to have when using Keepsake.

We used this branding throughout our social pages as well as our pre-launch site.

Logo and colors
Marketing Materials

Solution

A centralized experience

Keepsake makes the process of collecting family stories and curating them straightforward and engaging. It provides users with a place to put all of their artifacts into and the option to add in various pieces and types of information to capture their family memories in a meaningful way.

Sign Up

Introduction screens contain messages that are simple and direct.

Profiles

Easily input family member information and connect them with the stories you build.

Stories

Record story dates and details, and add photos, audio, or text content. Drag and drop cards to better customize and curate your family story.

Stories Timeline

Choose how you want to view your family history. On the story timeline, view all of your family's stories or filter by individual family members. See a minimized overview of your family's history or view stories close up with dates and names instead.

Question Bank

Get inspiration on topics to ask your family about. Visit the question bank for different topics and questions to help you get the conversation started

Problems Solved
01

Integrates all needs into one streamlined experience

02

Gives users way to customize their story curation experience

03

Supports family bonding and connection

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