Social media tend to encourage instant sharing, making it hard for us to treature the most valuable moments in our lives. We tend to care less when we know there are chances or flexibility. How might we nudge people to celebrate the moments that really matter? How might we make sure the experience is rewarding, motivating and forgiving?
On Everydaying, the user can post only ONE picture or video to highlight each day, so that we are encouraged to mindfully organize and share our memories.
This is a side project I started working on with our engineer Qi and PM Xuan since March, 2016. We launched its first version on iOS App Store in June, 2016. Two months in, the app was featured as No.2 in Hot This Week on the Europeanpp Store.
Identifying the problem
What is your moment of the day?
Instead of posting random pictures to multiple social media platforms, we need a way to reflect on the meaningful moments of our day and organize our memories mindfully. In order to achieve this we need a little bit of nudge and constraints.
Designing Everydaying, the challenge is to inspire and nudge the user in an unobtrusive way that is lightweight and fun. After playing around with several options, we decided to go with a timeline with breaks that stand for days when you forget to post. The timeline metaphor effectively represent the concept and achieve the goals, because they are best at emphasizing continuation; whereas the breaks could gently remind the user to carry on.
Making decisions
From the flow to visuals, every detail matters
Having figured out the core metaphor, we started to branch out the whole experience. I kept the flow and hierarchy as streightforward and flat as possible since the user really needs to be focused on the content rather than the process of completing a task. Before diving into details, we had many discussions over the key interactions and iterated on the high-level wireframes, making sure it feels natural for the user to upload an image/video, browse their timeline, navigate through the pictures in a swipe view, and interact with friends on their moment of the day.
In one of the early versions, Everydaying had a bottom tab bar that contains home, gallery, post, feed, and settings. This provided quick, flexible access to these functions, however, not all of them deserve such visibility and accessibility. The tab bar made the interaction unnecessarily heavy. Having the “Post” action accessible all the time sounds helpful, but in fact Everydaying doesn’t encourage users to keep posting things because only one thing is supposed to be recorded each day and additional content will over write the previous one. Given this, we came up with a flatter and lighter way of interaction.
Designing Everydaying, we need to nudge and motivate our users to be mindful while making sure the experience is flexible, rewarding and forgiving. The user can only keep one picture or video each day - if I’ve already recorded today and insisted on posting another one, the previous one will be erased. This encourages the user to think twice before posting without giving them pressure. When designing the UI I need to make sure the affordance for this concept can communicate effectively to the user.
If I’m able to post a picture or video every day, the timeline will form a continuous collection of the valuable moments of my life. But what if I had nothing to post for some of the days? Should it show up in the timeline at all? The answer is yes, since Everydaying encourages the user to try their best to record and memorize the highlight of each day. Showing the “disconnection” will remind the user and nudge them to make the timeline intact.
When we tested this screen, several users were trying to tap on the breaks, expecting more content to be revealed. Another downside of this design is that at a glance the user would have no idea how many days have been missed out. Therefore, the user needs more information along with the disconnection indicator, although they don’t necessarily want to surface it. So I designed a popup showing the missing days and an encouraging message as well as an illustration. By tapping on the disconnection icon, the user will get more information and stay motivated.
After using Everydaying for a while, our users can flip through pictures retrospectively, and see how they have been recording and interacting with friends. In the World section, you can see your friends’ activities and understand what matters to them.
Test & Improvement
Learn from the user and keep improving
During the design iterations we kept collecting feedback from our friends and families. When our engineer has developed the entire flow we decided to run user testing to refine the UX/UI and clear bugs. We asked a few friends to download the Alpha version of Everydaying and use it for a few days to weeks. We also did quick tests with people to let them go through the major flows.
One of the questions raised during the testing was, when other people are viewing my timeline, if I had private photos or things that were only visible to friends, what will they see? Will they end up seeing a broken timeline as if I didn’t post anything? According to our participants’ feedback, they still want to tell their friends they are posting their moments on Everydaying because it means something different to them - a positive and mindful attitude towards life. So we decided to show a smiley face with closed eyes (they have genders too) to tell others this image/video is only visible to the user, and to keep the timeline intact.
Empty state is another important thing to tackle. Seeing an empty timeline is discouraging and confusing to the user. Even after the user gets started, it’s still not a good experience when there’s only one or two pictures (could be broken timeline as well).
Delights & Inspirations
If Everyday can light up a smile
To add more fun and delights in the experience, I drew a set of illustrations for onboarding, empty state, adding friends, error messages etc., and created a consistent look and feel across our logo, icons, and overall visual style.
It’s been a fantastic journey designing and using Everydaying. During this past year of documenting my moments in Everydaying, I’ve become more mindful and grateful for the little things that are meaningful and treasurable. My mom is also using it to share the moments in her life with me - since we are not physically together this is even more helpful for us to understand one another and to express love to each other. Everydaying has been helping me to live my life to the fullest. Huge thanks to Qi and Xuan for initiating the awesome ideas and working together to make them real.
