LivesToTell

A voice-first storytelling app that helps seniors record their life stories and build them into a book with family.

Role: Product Design Intern
When: 2025–2026

Home

Points new users to their first recording, returning users back to their draft, and active users to their comments.

Adaptive banner. Changes with progress: record a first story, keep going, open your book, reply to comments.
Opening lines. Recent stories show their first sentence. In testing with seniors, image tiles alone didn’t bring people back.
Dated to memory. Stories carry the year they happened, not the day they were recorded.

Record

Built for voice. Nothing to learn before pressing record.

Large, high-contrast controls for record, pause and save.
Fragments. Record across sessions, reorder clips and attach photos from the camera roll.
Autosave. Every version is kept.

LivesToTell poster: a quote about meeting a spouse dancing at a cousin’s wedding, over a misty mountain range

LivesToTell poster: the app header over black-and-white photos of a surfer and glassware

Brand identity explorations

Draft Copilot

Once a recording is transcribed, an editor reads the draft and asks about what was skipped over.

Finds gaps and asks follow-up questions to draw out detail.
Three ways to answer: type, send a voice memo or tap a suggested reply.
Adjusts tone, pacing and structure while the story stays in the speaker’s words.

Story

The finished story, ready to read, add to the book or share.

Privacy per story: private, family and friends, or a local or global community.
Likes and comments let family respond and add their side.

Research

What interviews and secondary research told us about seniors, access and AI.

General findings: the first interview sample skewed towards well-supported seniors; some groups are offline entirely; access is fragile; disability, language and literacy block text-based flows; consent needs designing for; families want connection, which led to Tell It Together.

AI feature findings: open-ended AI chat is a barrier, so use quick actions; show fewer choices with one obvious next step; AI should suggest, never decide; trust is earned through low-stakes help; label AI edits; privacy and cost gate adoption.

Process

Discover, define, ideate, implement, with user testing looping back into wireframes.

Tell It Together

A feature I pitched to the co-founders that made it into the product. A grandchild, friend or caregiver joins from their own phone, linked to the storyteller’s account, and the two build a story side by side. The storyteller stays the author.

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