Overview
Highlighting and organizing family memories in a meaningful way
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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.
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.
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