At its core, social media has been a tool for people to share their stories and experiences. Today, that content is gifted in 30-second clips and enables doom scrolling, resulting in less time spent outdoors, with other people, and even with ourselves. During the pandemic, however, people began to realize the value of going outside and connecting with others. Seeing this as an opportunity to promote physical interaction, we decided to design a product that would build on familiar storytelling patterns in social media and older explorative games like geocaching to promote interaction with the physical world in more meaningful ways.
To better understand the sentiments of spending time outside, we interviewed 16 people regarding outdoor activity. From the responses, we synthesized that people go outside to refresh themselves, make memories, spend time with other people, explore new places, and destress. In short, people go outside to feel connected. And these sentiments were amplified by the pandemic.
We struggled to connect the dots—how could we encourage people to look away from their screens, explore, and share their experiences? One day, while venting to a friend, her mother chimed in, “Have you heard of geocaching?” I hadn’t. She explained how it worked: a scavenger hunt where people follow clues to a hidden object, signing a list or swapping an item upon discovery. The concept sparked something—geocaching made exploration exciting and rewarding. But objects alone wouldn’t fulfill our goal of fostering connection and lasting memories. So, instead of geocaching with objects, we reimagined it with memories.
How the app would work
1) Person A experiences something
2) Persona leaves a memory of it via a pin on the map.
3) Person B finds this memory.
4) Person B relates to and/or feels touched by the memory.
5) Person B feels inclined to continue the cycle and leave
their own memory for someone else to find.
How we visualized the experience
We visualized the experience by using locks and keys. The keys are memories that users hide for others to find, and only when they travel to the location does the lock reveal, and people can unlock a memory. Playing with a word bank consisting of words such as voyage, nostalgia, time, record keeping, etc., we chose to call this app Memory Lane.
Storyboard of potential user journey
To help us plan the design for the app, we storyboarded and developed a site architecture before jumping into designing the low-fidelity screens (storyboard illustrations done by Brandon Hyunh).
There are three key branches of navigation for a first time user: onboarding, map, and me. We wanted journeys to be the most accessible thing for users so we have the map be the first thing that they get to see. To further motivate users to interact with the app we added a ranking system based on how many journey's you've completed.
We created low-fidelity screens and tested them with nine users. While they found the concept intriguing, our testing revealed key areas for improvement. Users felt that start journey before starting was a little confusing, clearer closure after finding a key, and a more satisfying lock-unlocking experience. We were also suggested to explored ways to incentivize exploration and keep users engaged by occasionally notifying them of new journeys nearby.
As we implemented interview insights we also developed a visual language for the next app version. We wanted the app to feel clean, friendly, and add a touch of nostalgia. We decided to use a serif typeface for the logo paired with a simple location icon with a key inside. For the illustrations, we stuck to keeping the details as simple as possible and in order to give forms more dimension, gradients with grain texture was added on top.
Illustration Style
A preview for how someone would interact with Memory Lane.
Here are some key screens with brief descriptions of changes and additions.
We had the opportunity to present our work to a UX team from Nvidia and our project was well-received. They raised a valid concern that although our concept was interesting and fun, people can misuse the intent of the application and pollute the map with meaningless or even malicious pins, so having some security measures would be an essential consideration. As a team, we agreed and as next steps we would include safety measures into our product. Furthermore, to make the journey more competitive and game-like, maybe adding some checkpoints along the way before reaching the final destination would be beneficial.
