Case Study 05
Reinventing Today’s
Timecapsule
Capsa was a platform designed to lessen the noise of social media by creating a time capsule over time of the premium moments in the day.
Objective
Design and launch a mobile platform that would combat the negative effects on users memories that were associated with the overuse of social media.
Key Results
Within 3 months, we had built a fully functioning platform and brand, as well as results from beta testing cohorts that supported not just a hypothesis of what problems existed on certain social media platforms, but adoption from longtime users of those platforms.
Role
Head of Design, CoFounder
Capsa XFN Teams
UX, UI, Project Management, Product, Engineering
Mobile Time Capsuling
Based on the Science of Calming
Social media can be overwhelming – the science supports it. In this day and age of endless inputs, streams and feeds giving us instant non-stop content, the everyday person is teetering on the edge of losing any semblance of intentional attention and as a result, potential memory loss. Based on that statement, we wanted to build a tool that could combat the constant barrage of feeding and digesting social media. We sought out the support and endorsement of professional therapists and scientists studying the subject matter on the overcapturing of our lives in the social stratosphere and it’s effects on our memories. Thankfully, the issue had been well documented and deemed problematic by many - everyone seemed to be looking for solutions.
Defining the UX of timecapsuling
Following conversations with our technical and scientific advisors, we determined that we wanted the platform to focus on 1) the intentional capturing of our the daily moments and 2) the removal of having to post to social media. With these parameters in place, we went about studying which designs would manifest those actions and support the quieting of inputs and reinforce the preciousness of certain memories. The act of “timecapsuling moments” was born – we would force users to pick just one image a day to keep in their app and in doing so, help build on the preciousness of that singular moment over time.
Pictotagging
Along the way, we conjured up a feature but someone literally beat us to the punch – it sounds so simple now, but we wanted to tag photos/memories with pictograms and emojis. The day that we were about to submit our app to the App Store, Instagram posted on PR outlets that they had just launched the same feature that we had just designed. But as opposed to being a gamestopper, we used this as an affirmation that our product was headed in the right direction.
A successful beta
Once we had a functioning test platform, we sought out many users of all strata to give us a good landscape of how the product would be received. Aside from positive feedback on the novelty of time-capsuling, one of the best results we had was that the tool started to change the way our test pool used social media – during the testing phase, we started to see a drop in users daily posting to social media platforms. We weren’t able to track long-term behavioral changes, but based our initial testing, we were on to something!