Story Stack

Secondary Research: I started the research process by conducting secondary research, with a goal of understanding current solutions, the storytelling space, and how family storytelling ties into sense of self and digital storytelling considerations. This included reviewing around 20 academic papers, combing through forums, online blogs, and more.

Primary Research: I asked a variety of ages about what stories their families shared, when, and how. This included about 5 teenagers, 20 seniors at the Levy Senior Center in Evanston, and 4 middle generation adults. I also learned more broadly about keeping memories from someone who made memorial videos, and a relationships and aging professor at Northwestern. Research was organized, mapped, and turned into frameworks to define project direction.

Research Insights and Design Requirements
1. Making it easier to record stories: recording should be quick and flexible, with prompts that help fill in missing context naturally.

2. Bridging physical and digital storytelling: a family tool should feel warm and tangible, with digital as an option rather than a requirement.

3. Connecting generations through stories: stories resonate when they feel relevant - the experience should meet people of all ages where they are.

4. Representing legacies meaningfully: captures should reflect personality and specificity, not just facts.

From my research, I created the following problem statement to frame my focus:

After exploring early concepts with users, a storytelling game was the clear winner. Other concepts - a recording app, voice assistant, and in-call prompter - felt like too much work, invasive, or not kid-friendly. A game felt low-effort, fun, and engaging for all ages.

After further user testing on early storytelling game and recording ideas, I designed and printed out an initial version of the game that included a game board, prompt cards, voting on stories, and a dance punishment when stories voted against were told.

After user testing, I quickly found that while I thought this complex game would be fun, it was actually very confusing and the gameplay flow felt awkward. It was a lot of time wasted transitioning between using the spinner, moving the game pieces, pulling a card, voting, and dancing. The voting and dancing portions felt especially awkward and quiet - not great traits for a family game. I pivoted to a simple card game to keep the focus on family storytelling, and to make it easier for players of all ages to understand.

After receiving overall positive feedback on my mid-fidelity cards through gameplay tests, I iterated from user feedback to add more competitive wildcards into the deck and an additional storytelling category to lengthen the gameplay. In the process, I redesigned the cards and app, and designed a box and instruction manual that matched the new design system. The app was redesigned from the simple mid-fidelity designs to a more built out version with detailed interactions.

The app ended up including a mode to play with the physical cards, a mode to play with players completely virtually, and a story library. Input from my 2 thesis mentors and continued user research helped to shape the final output.

One of the biggest lessons was having to pivot from my initial, complex game concept to a completely new card game in three days. I had been confident my first version would work, so I'd designed and printed all the pieces, prototyped interactions in Figma, and bought materials to test it. It felt like a risk to scrap it all and start over, but based on how the gameplay session went, starting fresh felt easier than trying to fix something without a solid foundation. It was stressful, but the simplified direction ended up being much stronger.

As someone who likes to get to visual polish sooner rather than later, I saw how much time it would have saved to stay lower fidelity longer before testing. I also was reminded of the value of not being afraid to take a big pivot.

Another learning was preparing my thesis presentation. As someone who is naturally wordy, condensing months of work into a tight, clear story was difficult. With help from my professors and thesis mentor, I learned that leaving things out strategically can actually tell a clearer story than leaving everything in.

See the final presentation slides here.