Logan Ahern

A Virtual Time Capsule to Save Memories For Future Generations

📂 Project Overview

Timeline

March 25th - April 12th, 2024

Client Brief

Introducing the Virtual Time Capsule: Scheduled video messages sent to the future, creating surprise moments. Our aim is to enrich user experiences from birth to death, making interactions enjoyable for both sender and receiver. We're currently refining user flows to attract new users and identify our target market.

Team and Project Roles

Logan Ahern - Branding and Presentation

Fumiko Shinkawa - Client Contact and Interaction Design

Libby Painter - Research

📑 Project Summary

The Virtual Time Capsule (VTC) was initially designed to help people preserve their memories but struggled to gain traction. Our team at General Assembly identified that the key to success lay in narrowing the focus to a specific target market rather than trying to appeal to everyone. While VTC aspires to reach a broad audience eventually, we discovered in our research that starting with family historians would create the most impact. We developed an intuitive, user-centered process that guides these historians through documenting a person’s life or a significant day, ensuring these memories are preserved securely in the cloud for future generations.

✐ Getting Started

Checking Out the Current Product

VTC guides users from a landing page to their app. Users sign up, select a prompt, record/upload a video, and schedule it to be sent to a chosen recipient in the future.

Determining Priorities

Our initial focus was identifying the project's key aspect given a tight 2-week timeframe. After consulting with the CEO, we determined that defining a target user was the top priority.

Setting Project Goals

Knowing that defining a target user was top priority, we decided to focus on research above all else.

We also knew that given our timeframe, it would be crucial to prioritize the product's structure over its features during the design phase.

🕵🏼 Research

Objective and Approach

Our team wanted to first figure out how the current users of VTC were using the product. After reaching out and not receiving any leads for a few days, we decided to pivot to interviewing new users.

We sent out a survey and received 45 back. From those users, we conducted 9 interviews asynchronously. While we completed interviews, my teammate Libby conducted 5 usability tests.

Notable Survey Findings

The survey we sent out gave us a few notable insights into the product’s potential frequency use and it’s current value.

Interview Themes

Using Figma, our team conducted affinity mapping with 275 sticky notes containing insights from 9 interviews. We identified 40 groups across 9 categories.

Later, the 3 largest categories gave us the most clarity in our direction.

Usability Test Insights

Libby assigned 5 users the task of sending a birthday message, allowing us to gain valuable insights into the current user experience with the product.

🎯 Defining the User

Meet Sara, the Family Historian!

Sara values her family above all else. She grew up cherishing her grandparents' stories and now worries her children won't have the chance to hear them. She aims to strengthen their bond by documenting her family’s history but feels unsure where to begin.

The Problem, Defined!

🤺 Competitor Research

Once the persona was defined, it was easier to narrow down who our competitors were. I completed the competitor research on my own and presented it to the team.

Social Media

Social media sites allow their users to document their lives, start to finish; a literal timeline. Facebook even has a cool “On This Day” feature where users are reminded about a memory they posted on that day years before.

The downside, is that even though a user can make their profile private, social media isn’t generally a place where people get deep and personal.

Ancestry.com

Ancestry is known for discovering and documenting family trees.

Very recently, they added a feature where people can document stories within those trees. It’s a very interactive tool with prompts and templates guiding users to tell their stories.

Unfortunately, it’s currently all public.

Dropbox

Dropbox is a cloud storage tool. What’s cool about them is that users can create a folder, allow other people to participate in uploading files and send it to whoever at a scheduled date to be opened. They even advertise that you can make a time capsule with them!

However, Dropbox doesn’t offer any guidance so a user would have to know everything they want to include.

Physical Documentation

Along with all the digital options out there, there is still the good old fashioned method of preserving memories physically, like through scrapbooking.

It’s a creative way for people to display memories but it takes time and runs the risk of being damaged or lost.

🧑🏼‍💻 Ideation with the Client

After presenting the target user to the VTC team, we completed two ideation exercises together to determine a solution to Sara’s problem.

Worst Possible Solutions

We all started by writing out our worst possible solution to our user’s problem, such as: Bury your laptop and phone in the backyard.

This helped get all our bad ideas out and our brain wheels turning.

Crazy 8’s

After our bad ideas, we rolled into sketching 8 solutions in 8 minutes. This helped us find common ideas and determine a direction to go, together.

A More Defined Direction

With our sketches completed, and after sharing them with everyone, our team could start to see the direction VTC would need to head in to best support the user.

🏗️ Building and Testing Solutions

Solution 1: Addressing the Feeling of Not Knowing Where to Start

When a user goes to create a time capsule, they will have a series of questions to answer to help them build a usable template.

Solution 2: Curating Experiences

Our users care about other people understanding their experiences, so why not give them more freedom to tell their story?

Solution 3: Strengthening Relationships

The biggest theme we found in our research, is that users use sharing memories as a way to connect with people. By adding the ability for someone to ask a friend or family member to contribute to a capsule, users can strengthen their connections even more.

👩🏿‍🎤 Finding a Brand Identity

Colors and Fonts

Previously, VTC was using Impact for it’s header font and the Apple System Font for it’s body. Their color palette consisted of 3 colors: true black, true white and a variant of blue.

They wanted their site to feel inviting and positive so I softened the black, white and blue. To keep a soft and apporachable theme, I recommended using variants of Plus Jarkarta Sans.

Future Styles

Once the product becomes more defined, I think further research into the brand would be important.

I could see VTC heading in a direction similar to Apple’s Journal App integrating more color and style.

Moodboarding With the Client

I did get to moodboard with the CEO, and I noticed themes of purple, green and blue. I think that would be a great place to start when the product is built out more.

🖊️ The Solution Designed

Flow A

Person 1 is building a capsule for the first time, and since it’s their first time, they select “build from a template” to get assistance.

Flow B

Person 2 receives a request from Person 1 to add a memory to their capsule. They record a video about a time Person 1 and 2 laughed together, and send it to be added.

⏭️ Next Steps

Build an Onboarding Flow

To prevent any sort of product confusion, it would be important to include a user onboard flow, where someone is walked through how to use VTC.

Research Into What Kind of Stories People Want to Tell

And finally, since VTC helps create templates, research should be done into the types of stories people want to tell to determine what memories are associated with those stories.

For example, if a mom was building a capsule for her newborn, it would be important to interview new moms and dads to find out what they documented or wish they documented.

💬 Thanks For Reading, Let’s Chat!

What decisions would you have made differently? Is there anything you would like clarification on?

Let me know below :)

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