StoryUs
Help families curate and pass on their life stories to loved ones.
Team:
Timeline:
My Role:
Tools:
Xinyi Xu
Lu Gan
Taka Kodani
Feb. 2018 - May. 2018
UX Research
Concept Generation
Interaction Design
UI Design
Usability Test
Sketch
InVision
UserTesting.com
FRAMING THE PROBLEM
Most people view family as an important part of their life.
The importance of family is consistently high across racial/ethnic, age, and income groups. [1]
Families are spread out. Seniors feel lonely.
Most 50+ respondents report having children, grandchildren, sibling, or extended family members living more than an hour away and often more than five hours away.[1]
Countries are increasingly becoming more multicultural like the US.
The racial and ethnic diversity of communities varies greatly across the country, but rapid change is coming to many of the least-diverse areas.[2]
[1] Lake Research Partners, 2012, "Family Today: A Study of U.S. Family"
[2] "Where the country is becoming more diverse".Dan Keating, Laris Karklis, Nov 25 2016. Washingtonpost.com
With how family members have a tendency to be scattered all over the world these days, and with how countries are increasingly becoming more multicultural like the US, it becomes all the more important to connect various family members together, so that they are aware of their roots and their background, regardless of where they may be.
Build an emotional bond among family members and a sense of belonging for the individual.
StoryUs provides an outlet for people to share their stories, and a platform for them to listen to these narratives. We imagine the stories will have the opportunity to shine by being preserved in a multimedia "Album" and can be remembered in detail for generations.
SHARE STORIES
StoryUs allows users to share their stories in multiple ways like audio, video, photo and text, which make it accessible to different age groups. In addition, users can add story tags to each story.
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STORY COLLECTION
It's easy to curate story in StoryUs. Users are able to create collection folders and add stories to them. Tagging a story enables all the stories to be searchable and filterable.
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FAMILY TREE & STATISTICS
We designed a genealogical component for StoryUs, where users can learn about their family by building a family tree (both current and ancestral). In addition, users are able to see story distribution in the US, and see family demographic.
GAMIFICATION(CONCEPT)
As a way to obviate abandonment or infrequent use of the application, gamification features will be considered so that users return to it on a more regular basis.
PROCESS OVERVIEW
Inspired by Madison Zeller's diagram
EMPATHIZE & DEFINE
Interview
I interviewed 5 people about their attitudes toward sharing and storing family stories, learning about their family members by listening to their stories, thoughts about game elements, and reasons for using the high-tech devices and apps.
"I have a multi-cultural family. I want to know more about my family history and roots."
"I am a child of immigrants. My relatives live in another country, I am curious about them."
Although the senior has the ability to use apps on a basic level, he often feels helpless if they are even a little complicated and not user-friendly.
"I am interested in my family members' childhood stories, love stories, funny stories, personal stories relate to historical events such as war."
"We pass our stories from mouth to mouth."
"It's hard to keep family stories in a long run"
" Social media focuses on friends instead of family, the now instead of the past."
"I am trying to motivate other family memebers to share their stories.
"Observation reveals what is happening, but it takes interpretion and speculation to understand why."
Jane Fulton-Suri, IDEO
Synthesis
Our team aggregated our interview responses and observations and then recognized patterns and relationships. Based on the results, I created the figure on the right side to demonstrate our product attributes.
Insights:
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People want to learn more about family history, roots and origin, but it's hard to keep fragmental family stories in a long run.
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Stories should have different kinds of formats.
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Motivating other family members to share their stories is hard.
Product Attributes
Affinity Diagram
Competitive Analysis
Direct Competitors:
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No interaction between family members.
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More focus on finding/matching family members rather than story-sharing.
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Support limited story formats.
Indirect Competitors:
Social Media
How might we...
Help families curate and pass on their life stories to loved ones?
IDEATION
Storyboard
We started ideating from the key insights we generated. We designed the storyboards about helping families curate and pass on their life stories.
Sitemap
After we ideated the storyboards, we designed the sitemap for our StoryUs application design.
PROTOTYPE
Content Map
USER TESTING
We ran 3 rounds of user testing in 3 weeks to see if the prototypes meet our intended purposes. We wrote a usability testing script. The tasks contained in the script were intended to test some of the main aspects of the prototype that we had developed so far: adding family members, adding and reviewing stories, reviewing family members' profiles, and finding the dashboard. We asked users to evaluate each task's difficulty and try to extract overall thoughts and impression on the prototype so as to make improvements on the next iteration.
Home Page
In the first user testing, users were confused about the search bar and never used the switch button. Therefore, I added hints in the search bar, deleted the switch button and changed the icons and name of "Dashboard." In the third round, I added deceased ancestors to imply the app supports stories of many generations.
First Round
Second Round
Third Round
Adding Family Members
The second round explained what to expect if users invite family members. In the third round, I merged the phone number bar and email address bar to streamline the invitation process.
First Round
Second Round
Third Round
Story Menu
Since users didn't understand "Tell," "Challenge," "Explore," "Album," in the second round we tried to explain them clearly. In the third round, "Story challenge" was changed to "Ask a question" as users didn't like "Challenge" which sounded like a task. Big icons were also added to inform texts.
First Round
Second Round
Third Round
Sharing Multi-media Story
In the second round, we made changes to allow users to create story information in one step. In the third round, the prototype was refined by providing clearer guidance. The big icons are suitable for seniors as well.
First Round
Second Round
Third Round
Gamification
In the second round, I added some gamification in story challenge to encourage story-sharing. Additionally, "Ask a Question" was changed to "New Challenge" to make it consistent with "Story Challenge". Some users said they didn't want to know unfamiliar family members' questions because it was a little awkward. Therefore, in the third round, we set "Story Challenge" private.
First Round
Second Round
Third Round
Story Collection
In the second round, I put "Collection" feature in the "Explore Family Story" page to see how it worked. It turned out that users would ignore this feature. Therefore, in the third round, I designed the "Collections" as a sperate feature in Story Menu, as well as simplified "Explore Stories" page.
First Round
Second Round
Third Round
FUTURE CONSIDERATIONS
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Some test participants kept thinking of StoryUs as a social media app.
"For the purpose of connecting with family, Facebook already does that. Something has to stand out."
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Engaging users long term is something that may need further work.
SCHOOL OPEN HOUSE
