Storyline App Idea

Have you ever been curious about people’s perspectives of other cities, or even other countries? Or wanted to write and share an experience from a particular time and place? Maybe you wanted to connect with someone with a similar background while in a new country or city?

If you “yes” to any of these questions? Welcome to Storyline… 

Target Users: People who like to share stories or love to explore new cultures around the world.

Challenges

After my design synthesis and user interviews, I discovered that the storyline offered a valuable tool to encourage writers can create a community to encourage writers to share their intimate knowledge of different communities and connect with relevant audiences. I decided to create an engaging community for lifestyle-oriented readers and writers and also provide a more personalized experience for the users to browse their interests.

Research

To better understand users' needs, I did research on potential users and competitors.  After analyzing my research, I defined several pain points:

Users want a platform where they can  jot down their ideas, experiences, and stories so that they can share them with others who have a different background and culture than they do.

• People want to know about culture and traditions of countries directly from natives. On the other hand, people from the same city and similar background can read stories about each other, which will cheer them up and lead to new insights and experiences.

• It is hard to find a platform to help with spelling errors, but this app features descriptive word lists for writers to make their sentences come alive. This is also useful writers whose first language is not English.

Solutions

RELEVANT CONCERNS, ALL IN ONE PLACE

This new app helps users to both share and find personalized stories in a variety of categories and locations. It finds like-minded individuals eager to read stories based on common interests and helps writers gain confidence in their abilities.

Ideation

Information gathered from surveys and interviews provides insight into which features to prioritize for the Storyline app.

Wireframe

After doing a couple rounds of paper prototype testing and iterations, I decided to make the story feed and pin location the landing page in order to emphasize the main features of the app.

Usability Testing

After I had created wireframes, I then designed a clickable prototypeon InVision and conducted usability testing with potential STORYLINE users.

• Users found the navigation and overall UI layout easy to use.
• When users read the stories, their first reaction is to scroll down the sidebar instead of turning the page. They recommend me to introduce this function on the boarding page because they like the swipe feature, which makes it easier to check the number of pages a story has.
• Feedback from users, features layout and the statistic page are shown below.

Choose tags/feed/search

Users can tag their interests before they enter the main page. It is an easily customizable feed with recommended stories when browsing categories. 

Readers' View

Reader can swipe just like an e-books and quickly add comments without scrolling down. Users can go to the writer's profile page, follow his or her other stories, and chat. 

Writers' Views

Writers can easily create their stories. They have several features including grammar check, adding multi-media and hyperlinks. Users can insert photos from their phone as well as take pictures and edit photos at the same time.

Profile

Profile displays a lot of main features, including reading history, statistics, bookmarks, drafts, and chats. The timeline is unique feature in profile settings which helps people to organize their stories and memory-tracking path.

What I learned:

Ask the right questions and Decrease steps for users

This is my first solo project and there are many strategies I learned in the design process. I spent much time researching and brainstorming to gather useful data, which helped me collect helpful information for my designs. From the surveys, I gathered very useful insights from the free-response questions. In order to increase usability, the most effective method was to decrease steps so users needed less time to learn.