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.
Research
UI/UX Design
Branding
This was a passion project completed over the course of a year outside of work hours by a team of five people excited about finding a way to help users capture family stories.
Responsibilities
Research
UI/UX Design
Brand Identity
The team
Eastina Zhang
Designer
Jenny Li
Founder / Copywriter
Rai Medeiros
Co-founder / Product Manager
About
Highlighting and organizing 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.

Initial research focused on better understanding user needs related to family story collection as well as their existing process or workarounds for gathering family stories. We wanted to learn more about which functions/features are essential to them for the story collection process.
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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.
Users used a variety of different methods to collect family stories, including sending photos in a family group chat, audio recordings, written records, digital photo albums, physical photo albums, and social media accounts. What was missing was a centralized location to gather these various pieces of information.

After conducting user interviews, all the participants responses were synthesized to identity themes, opportunities, and features that Keepsake could focus and improve upon.
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We also conducted affinity mapping to identify high level themes and group similar insights gained from the user interviews. Something unexpected we discovered was a hesitancy to bring up certain topics with family members. While our users were all eager to connect with their family and collect stories, family dynamics could be complicated, causing hesitancy to ask certain questions.
Our key takeaways:
Users often feel overwhelmed with the amount of content they have to curate
Tools products in the market lack desirable features and feel impersonal
Users don't know how to organize the information that they have
Users have no centralized location to put all the information they are gathering
Users value the ability to have creative freedom in their story curation process
Users sometimes struggled with how to bring up certain topics and questions
Ideate
Carving out a niche in a saturated market
We wanted to give users a story-documentation experience that was tailored specifically to collecting the stories of their family members and also allowed users to be flexible and creative in how they wanted to capture their stories.

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.

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


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Using the feedback and insights gained from research, analysis and sketching, a low-fidelity prototype was created to begin user testing.
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User testing was conducted to determine where improvements could be made and identify new ideas to satisfy user expectations, needs, and desires.
Pain points
New ideas
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Users often feel overwhelmed with the amount of content they have to curate
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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.
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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

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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.
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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.
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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.
Visual identity
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.

Social media posts

Landing page
Final design
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.

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

Users can create profiles for different family members and easily add them to the stories they're creating.

Users can input the story time but choosing a date or inputting the ages of their family member at the time.

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.

Get inspiration on topics to ask your family about. The question bank contains different topics and questions to help users get the conversation started