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.
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.
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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.

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.

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