PAGES THROUGH TIME

SEPTEMBER - DECEMBER 2021

ROLE: DESIGNER, UX RESEARCHER

Working with a team of designers, business women, engineers and information scientists, we created Pages Through Time to solve the issue of declining memory within older demographics whilst aging in place. Aging in place is a choice older generations have to age peacefully in their own homes, rather then aging in a senior center where they have around the clock care. Aging in place poses serious concerns, as the individuals may become less mobile, less aware and are more prone to accidents where they are unable to care for themselves. Pages Through Time targets 65-85 year old adults aging in place by themselves or with a spouse who have declining memory. These individuals are looking to save older generational experiences and memories that they can gift to generations to come, while simultaneously connecting with their current family to create the book. Pages Through Time allows customers and their loved ones to share stories that can be kept as a living legacy no matter how much may change with time.

Pages Through Time is a hypothetical service that offers an opportunity to cherish your memories and connect with family to do so. Below you will find our business model as well as results from the Trade show where we pitched our idea to potential buyers.

BUSINESS MODEL

The Why?

Target User

Pages Through Time allows customers and their loved ones to share stories that can be kept as a living legacy no matter how much may change with time. We targeted 65-85 year old adults living alone or with a spouse, who have declining mobility, memory and potentially strong generational connections within the family, even if they are not physically close. These individuals are looking to save older generational experiences and memories to carry with them in the future or to gift to loved ones.

Scenarios & Use Cases

User 1 is a 66-year-old elderly individual who has mobility issues and his memory is declining. He is concerned with losing touch with historical experiences and knowledge. He also likes to tell stories and wants to have a keepsake to document those memories and be able to show them to others. He booked our services, recorded his memories, and uploaded images on our website. Then he got his personalized memory book from us. He put this book on a bookshelf and when his grandchildren came to visit him, he would pull it down and show it to them. Now he has a way to share his favorite memories for years to come.

User 2 is an 85-year-old elderly individual who does not remember past memories. She has a tough time talking to her loved ones and hopes to better connect with them. Her son previously ordered a memory book for her as a gift through the services we provided. Since she received this book, she often carries it with her so that she can review her past experiences and memories. She also plans to pass it down to younger generations or community members in the future.

The What?

Our Solution

Our solution better allows our customers and their loved ones to share stories and keep memories alive, our team creates custom storybooks that can be kept for generations as family memorabilia. Each storybook will include a custom illustration on the hardcover and up to 36 pages of text and images. The storybook is printed on high quality 8.5” X 11” gloss paper binded by a premium hardcover. The storybook is then packaged inside a box designed with our logo to be shipped to the customer.

Information Gathering

To begin the design process of the custom storybook, we ask our clients to create an account on our website pagesthroughtime.com (no longer in service) and upload their stories to their account dashboard in the “My Recordings” section. Users can either use our on-site recorder or upload a pre-recorded audio file to document their stories. We also ask that users upload any relevant photographs to our website. Both the stories and photographs are recorded in the “My Memories” section of the user’s account dashboard. Users will have one month to submit their recordings and images to their customer profile on the website. This information is stored in our database and will always be accessible to our clients to look back on.

Storybook Creation

Once the necessary information (recordings and images) are gathered, the team has one month to complete the storybook design and create a first draft of the story to send to the client/user for an initial review. This review process ensures that our stories are true to the client’s memories and represent what the client was envisioning their story to represent and also has correct dates and information provided throughout the story.

The team begins the review process by using transcription software to get the stories on paper. The transcripts are then reviewed by our team of content editors. Our illustrators and editors work together in carefully pairing the images and transcription to create an elegant and cohesive story, along with an illustrated front cover. In the future, our team plans to develop an artificial intelligence software that will use natural language processing to automate the design and editing process, ultimately resulting in reduced labor costs.

After the first draft is finalized, it is then sent to our clients for review. To ensure that the storytelling process and information within the stories are correct, we want to give our clients a collaborative stance in our product development process. The clients have one week to review the draft, then our team has one more week to make any necessary changes before the digital storybook is then sent to our publisher to bring the storybook to physical form.

The Who?

User Personas

When considering user personas (Appendix A), our team thought about what important legacies or items individuals might want to keep for their families or communities. We realized that a lot of individuals have key memories and keepsakes that they always intend to properly utilize, but never end up having the time or motivation to work on this type of project.

This was further highlighted when interviewing a variety of family and community members and healthcare workers. Families indicated a lack of connection between various generations, and healthcare workers noted the loneliness that can come from being in an elderly home away from family or with little interaction with the outside world.

Market Segments

As our team was building out Pages Through Time, we noted that those who had a desire to save memories in this way could be divided into two main groups: those who are aging in place that desire to remember and revisit important memories for themselves or with their families, and younger generations, typically the children of individuals aging in place, who want to create a sense of continuity, legacy, and family connection across multiple generations.

Within each of these groups, there is an opportunity for both physical collection and allocation of personal artifacts, as well as an opportunity to “fill in the blanks” with historical and contextual information as needed or desired by the individual.

For individuals who do have personal memorabilia to fill a book, our product assists in not only collecting the physical memorabilia, but also in pairing the memorabilia with the story and personal significance of the family or individual. This includes helping to record, edit, and transcribe memories, anecdotes, and family history shared through narrative and in-person interactions. For the individual who doesn’t have personal memorabilia to contribute to their book, our team assists in locating information from important moments in the timeframe of their story and experience. An example of this could be an individual who had immigrated to the U.S. as a child and does not have personal mementos from their childhood arrival or experiences. Our team researches and includes important historical and cultural moments to assist in clarifying, revisiting, and connecting to an individual’s lived experience.

Sizes

While the physical tasks of collection, allocation, and transcription of our product involves a higher cost, we believe that our product has large market size potential (Appendix B: Text Citations 1 & 2) As of 2014, the digital photography market was valued at around $6.8 billion and the scrapbooking market was around $3 billion. We believe this leaves the door open for our product to fill a gap in the photography, genealogy, and scrapbooking industries for an easier-to-access and utilize personal memory product for individuals, families, and communities.

The How?

Sourcing Labor

Our service and product require content editors, illustrators, and a book printer. We will hire content editors to help with content creation, which entails recording review, editing, and transcription corrections, as well as page design involving combining images and story text for each page of the book. We will also hire illustrators to create the custom cover illustrations. To produce the books, we will work with a book printer to print and ship the final product. In the long run, we may consider investing in our own printing equipment to hopefully lessen the cost of outsourcing printing.

Pricing

We are offering our service, which includes the ability for customers to record, upload images, submit and manage projects online, review a final product draft, and receive the final product, for a flat price of $300. While we do not have many customizable elements in the book itself, this is easier for customers; they just need to submit a recording and images, review the final proof prior to printing, and that’s it. Customers are guaranteed a high quality product and know what they are paying for up front – a matte hardcover with a custom illustration and gloss, color pages – all created with the unique touch of our design team. Shipping is paid for by the customer so they can choose the delivery option that best meets their needs once the book is printed.

Channel and Distribution

We are a B2C business and plan to sell our service through our own direct-to-consumer e-commerce website: pagesthroughtime.com (no longer in service). This site will provide customers with an easy and direct way to purchase our service and a one-stop-shop for managing their accounts and projects. For distribution, we will ship the completed storybook to customers directly from our printer.

Sales, Support, & Marketing

To support customers, we plan to have an FAQ page on our website to answer basic questions along with a way for customers to contact us directly. In addition to sending customers updates when we receive their initial submission, we will also inform them of when the proof is ready for review, and their book has been printed and shipped. Although we do not accept returns, as it would be extremely costly, we offer proof review and customer confirmation prior to printing and shipping to ensure customer satisfaction.

To increase brand awareness, we plan to have a social media presence on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram as key platforms for our customers, as well as to allow customers to search for our company in a variety of ways. As an e-commerce business, a digital approach to marketing will be key to our success and developing brand recognition. In addition to our online presence, we will reach the senior population through strategic advertisements in publications, such as Good Housekeeping, and ideally through word-of-mouth recommendations.

Design Portfolio Journey

Our team began the product development process by conducting interviews with people who fit the aging in place demographic and researching secondary sources to gain more insight. Once this was completed, we took all the information we gathered and created empathy maps as well as conducted an initial ideation brainstorm. Review Images A & B below for more detail.

Image C is an example of one of our initial product ideas we pitched for DR1 based on user research. We pitched five initial ideas, which can be further explored on our Miro Board, linked in Appendix C.

Feedback from DR1 led us to realize how broad our scope was for “aging in place” within our initial pool of ideas. We then decided to backtrack and continue the ideation process through collaboratively creating mind maps based on our initial research and really trying to consider the common themes we heard among our interviewees. We then further ideated using those maps as a new baseline. A more in-depth look at this stage of our research process can be seen with Images D & E or on our Miro Board.

Instead of focusing on the negative aspects of aging in place that our research highlighted, we decided to focus on products that could help enhance what older generations enjoy doing. From our ideation process, we narrowed down our ideas into five different potential products. Images F & G illustrate two examples of these products, however, all five (including what problems they are solving to enhance enjoyable activities) can be seen on our Miro Board.

To gauge user response to our new product ideas, we took all five ideas and conducted concept testing. We did this by creating a survey that we sent out to 57 people both within our target demographic and outside of the demographic but who still could envision a target user engaging with our products. The results of our survey are shown in Image H. A link to the survey we created can be found in Appendix D. Based on our survey results, we discovered that the overwhelming favorite product idea was “Memories By Design.” More results for our other products can be seen on our Miro Board.

“Memories By Design,” later changed to “Pages Through Time” to ensure adherence to intellectual property rights and protection, was the top idea that we as a team decided to move forward with. Our initial idea was to primarily use illustrations to document the customer’s life story like you would typically see in a storybook. A mockup of an example page design for this version can be seen below in Images I & J.

Costs for production of this specific version were too high after further research. We also realized from feedback that there was no special significance in creating custom illustrations of the customer’s life rather than just using personal images. Mockup images of the new version that uses images over illustrations can be seen below with Images K & L.

We continued to develop the idea and service process so that it would be easy for customers to use, including the addition of a website that allows users to record their stories and upload relevant images. Our final version still incorporates our initial idea of custom illustration, but instead of throughout the book, just on the front cover. All pages inside of the book consist of text and images provided by the customer. Finalized page spreads and physical product images can be seen following the images provided in our design journey under “Physical Book,” “Page Spreads,” and “Packaging Design.”