StoryBank Mobile App
SquarePlanet
Home screen displaying two primary user actions: Browse for stories; Add an idea.
My Bank screen featuring saved stories.
Browse for stories (left) and detail view of a selected story (right).
Overview
SquarePlanet is a presentation coaching, branding, and event production company based in Chicago, IL but works with clients all over the United States. During my time as the Marketing Director, we worked to create a concept app to help people capture thoughts, ideas, and stories to use in their presentations.
The project was decommissioned due to budget constraints, but we were able to build some high-fidelity comps to shop around to potential users for feedback.
The Concept
SquarePlanet encourages people to leverage the power of a story in their presentations. To help customers curate ideas we set out to create an app that would allow users to browse a library of stories curated by SquarePlanet along with the ability to add their own ideas as text, photo, or audio recordings.
Features
• Browse a curated library of content from SquarePlanet
• Discover a new story each day
• Add Ideas as text, photos, or audio recordings
• Share stories with others
• Download creative assets to support presentations
• Discover a new story each day
• Add Ideas as text, photos, or audio recordings
• Share stories with others
• Download creative assets to support presentations
Sequence of proposed pages for the StoryBank App (Concept).
Feedback
When presented to users for review, the feedback was generally positive. Most of the potential users said they would use and app like this, but maybe not every day. They were also unclear what the icons at the bottom were supposed to be for, which informed us that there was some work to do on the overall navigation.
Several users wanted to click the vault graphic the main split screen, which was originally intended to be animated when selecting either 'Browse' or '+ Idea'.
Grid of proposed pages for the StoryBank App (Concept).
Lessons Learned
Since this was an early-stage prototype, we could have spent more time building out the concept in a rough form first. This would have allowed us to rapidly test the concept without creating a bias with our testers.
Building out more personas to understand our users would have also been very helpful. We accounted for sales-oriented presenters but could have explored personas that weren't mirror images of our client base. This could have helped to benefit a broader range of people.
