Coda

Coda is an app that assists users in documenting, digitizing and sharing their life story.

TIMELINE

6 weeks (2022)

TEAM

Erin Forbes

Carol Z

Ashima M

Erin J

MY ROLE

I conducted research and interviews as well as designed wireframes and prototypes for this project. My contributions were most notable in determining the information architecture of Coda.

Artifacts individuals use to share their legacy are decentralized and lack structure. This makes it difficult to share their legacy in a meaningful way.

Let’s be honest. Every household has that one drawer. A chaotic mix of receipts saved from memorable meals, dad’s birthday card from two years ago, a couple of “spare parts” that everyone has forgotten what they are actually for, and some pictures that got printed but never quite found the photo album. This is an all-too familiar scene for most households. But what if there was a way to organize and save all those tiny bits of life without the clutter?

CHALLENGE

We designed a platform that assists users in creating and sharing their digital legacy, centralizing their artifacts to tell a cohesive and beautiful story

Coda is a product that helps users to create a digital archive of their life, tailored to who they are sharing it with. It is a powerful tool to not only store information but also to control how it is structured into a story.

SOLUTION

Centralize Your Media

Only 8% of people have a plan for their digital legacy. Coda helps users create a plan so that their data finds its intended audience. Easily upload any media type and group related media to tell a story.

Create Compelling Stories

Coda assists in organizing your media and events into unique storylines that you can playback. Tag content to find and edit entries easily.

Organize Who You’ll Share With

69% of Americans say they most want to be remembered by sharing their memories. Coda gives users the tools to customize and build unique stories based on who they are sharing with, and the type of content they are sharing, ensuring their legacy finds its intended audience.

How are users currently documenting their legacies?

First, we needed to understand how users currently documented their legacy to determine what Coda’s unique value proposition would be. Looking online, themes we saw again and again in relation to legacy documentation were:

  • Structure - people lacked a way to structure the immense amounts of information that they needed to tell their life’s story

  • Content flexibility - there were diverse means of storytelling, from photos to audio to video. Individuals needed the flexibility to use any type of media necessary to tell their story

Having discovered several competitors in our preliminary research, we dug deeper to learn what they did well that we could learn from, and also where users encountered challenges so that we might address these with Coda. 

RESEARCH

Using what we had learned from our research so far we wanted to better understand our user’s needs and challenges to best design our solution. We interviewed 7 individuals and sorted their responses into an affinity diagram to identify common themes between our participant’s responses.

  1. Many users did not have their artifacts centralized, which was not only a security concern but made them very difficult to share 

  2. We validated the assumption that there were a large variety of use cases beyond leaving a legacy after passing, for example, users wanted to share their artifacts with family who lived far away

  3. The types of information and tone it will be delivered in is something that users want to customize depending on who they are addressing

How can we facilitate the documentation, organization, and sharing of diverse personal legacies as one centralized digital artifact?

OPPORTUNITY

Balancing structure with flexibility

We brainstormed how we would bring simplicity to complexity when it came to designing the information architecture of Coda. Building a legacy is a complex task, so we needed to find a way to provide users with clues about how to structure their legacy. We decided to use skeuomorphism to help, using the analogy of a novel to guide Coda’s IA.

DESIGN

Using this skeuomorph, I created a site map based on the requirements for each page we had decided on as a team. This helped to create a visual understanding of Coda’s navigational structure and information architecture as well as defining what actions happened on each page.

From the site map, we determined four simples levels of hierarchy needed to build meaningful stories:

Legacy > Chapters > Events > Media

Roadblocks

Creating our first flow we ran into a roadblock: we had a very specific idea about how users would add media from the bottom navigation - but this was really impeding our flow. It took us stepping back to see that this idea was something we had integrated without considering if it contributed to the usability of our design. Once we designed a solution grounded in our user’s feedback, rather than our ideas of what they might want, our further iterations of this flow came together.

We tested our medium fidelity designs through internal critiques and with Useberry to determine how users moved through the flow and the level of difficulty they felt when creating a new memory with audio and photo content.

While 90% of our users completed the test in ~1 minute and 35 seconds, 67% said there was a point in the flow where they felt confused or frustrated. Based on their feedback we were able to make the following key changes

TESTING
PAIN POINT

The hierarchy of having the new node already appear below previous nodes was confusing, users thought new content should appear at the top.

SOLUTION

We created an "add node" button to allow users to add information progressively. The new node appears above the existing nodes.

PAIN POINT

Having a preview area available before content was filled did not make sense to users.

SOLUTION

We removed "Tap to preview" until there is at least one node within the memory.

We wanted the UI of the app to represent the multitude of different emotions and circumstances users may present in their legacy. We chose our visual design assets to be highly transferrable to fit a variety of different use cases.

VISUAL DESIGN
WRAPPING UP

Business Outcomes

Coda was a personal project. If this were a real product here are some criteria I would want to monitor:

  • User Engagement: How often do users use the platform per day/week/month and how long per session? How often do they upload and/or update artifacts?

  • User Retention: Is there sustained interest and usage of the platform over time?

  • Social Sharing + Collaboration: User engagement with collaborative features (comments, co-authoring, etc.).

Personal Outcomes

There’s more than one way to do everything

Spending time on our personal conceptions of what media upload should look like without correlating the design to real user needs costs us a lot of time on this project.

Validate changes

We only had time to test our iterations once which meant that we couldn’t validate the changes we made as a result of our initial round of testing. Ideally I would have wanted to run the same test to ensure that we could quantify the impact of the changes we made. I would prioritize this in my time management in the future.