Mobile App Concepts

Throughout my time in college, I produced a number of mobile app design concepts to explore the ways our phones might complement our connection to the world around us, and encourage us to explore it and try new things.

The process of finding somewhere to eat or something to do with friends or family can be involved, time-consuming, and often irritating. By distilling the decision-making process down to its most fundamental parts, Rive acts as a guide for quickly making the perfect decision on new options for restaurants and recreation.

Curated “decks” map to your tastes, the time of day, and the day of the week to suggest restaurants to try or things to do.

The user can swipe through a deck of destinations with their friends, and make a quick decision to avoid arguments and get going right away.

I toyed with the idea of navigating users to an unknown location, revealing more info about it as they got closer. The feedback I got was that this is “terrifying” – in hindsight, they were totally right.

Hereseum brings the past alive, wherever you are. Using data and photos from Instagram, travel through time to explore the history of your location. Remember great events and fun times, uncover lost relics, and become a historian of anywhere.

With help from a friend, we had a version of this live in the Google Play store for a time. Instagram eventually disabled this in their API and implemented something like it in the app itself.

The UI presents a feed similar to Instagram’s, but with photos from where you are at that moment, rather than who you’re following.

I played with features like setting a custom location, and saving favorite photos, but the focus here was on traveling through time in your present location.

What if you could create a dynamic soundtrack to your life by mapping different styles of music to the areas you visit most? Lilipod aimed to explore an interface for mapping playlists to areas on a map, so you could decide what feels right when you’re driving or riding along the beach, in your neighborhood, or downtown.

An early rendition of the mapping screen. Toggling between moving the map and coloring it in felt clunky.

I came up with a solution for coloring in the map with precision– a resizable reticle in the center that could be resized and filled in as you pan the map.

The “now playing” interface (also an embarrassing relic of the music I was listening to in 2014).

Photo Challenge

Coming out of high school, social media felt increasingly like an unspoken competition to see who was having the best life. This made me wonder – what if the feed was an actual competition, where friends could compete in time-limited challenges to post the best photo to respond to a prompt, and be directly judged by their peers? In a fun way that makes everyone feel included, of course.