01 | Overview
Designing a Home for the Past
Arbor is a mobile app designed to be a garden rich with your life experiences, acting as a prompt to intentionally and delightfully engage with your past.
Built as a three-person team, Arbor started from a broad idea,"Preserving the Past,” and evolved through interviews, rapid prototyping, and three full fidelity cycles into a working React Native app wrapped in hand-drawn 8-bit pixel art.
Arbor was presented at Stanford’s Human-Computer Interaction Expo, a showcase with deep roots in the Silicon Valley and academic community attended by industry professionals, researchers, and founders.
Out of 40 teams, Arbor took home 3 awards: Best Concept Video, Most Novel Product, and Best Poster.
Role
Designer
Researcher
Timeline
10 weeks
Tools
Figma, Piskel, React Native, Firebase,
Google Suite
Skills
Needfinding
POVs + HMWs + Storyboards
UX/UI Research & Design
Prototyping & Development
02| TL;DR
The Challenge
Gap
People don't have an efficient, intentional way to recall past positive memories
Goals
Make reflection frictionless
Cement positive memories
Foster human connection
The Solution
Arbor is a virtual garden where memories grow into trees. The process of logging a memory and having game mechanics nudge intentional, periodic reminders of past positive memories are proven to help cement these memories in a user’s mind.
Plant a memory — log a memory within a seed, saving it in a plot to grow over time.
Feed your character — when a fruit ripens, tap to “eat”- reviewing the memory and feeding your avatar
Share with friends — mail fruit holding memories to loved ones through the in-game post office.
Awarded Best Poster
03| Our Process
Overview
Ideate
3 POVs & 40+ HMWs
Experience prototypes
Assumption testing
Research
7 user interviews
Empathy mapping
Diverse participants ages 20–67
Prototype
Lo-fi paper prototype
Med-fi Figma prototype
Hi-fi React Native app
Iterate
Usability testing
Heuristic evaluation
3 full design revisions