Orb.
Timeline
October 2024-
May 2025
Role
Product Designer
UX Researcher
Tools
Figma
Adobe
Orb is a multisensory memory tool that helps people capture, reflect on, and relive meaningful moments more deeply. By combining photos and videos with emotion tagging, mood-color mapping, and music integration, Orb preserves not just what happened but how it felt — making nostalgia more vivid, personal, and immersive.
Nostalgia and memories are integral to the human experience, allowing us to revisit moments that shape our identity. They help us relive the joy of a recent birthday party, the fondness of a childhood pet, or even allowing us to feel reconnected with with loved ones we've lost. Nostalgia not only preserves our past but also enriches our present by fostering emotional connections and shaping our sense of remembrance.
People take photos, write things down, but they often lose the emotion they felt in that moment.
Over time, the emotion fades even if the memory stays.
We want to change that.
Sensory memory is a fleeting form of memory that temporarily captures and retains sensory information (like sights, sounds, and smells) for a few seconds, enabling the brain to process and make sense of immediate experiences. Engaging multiple senses can reinforce a memory trace, making it more likely to be noticed and remembered
To better understand the strategies and features that resonate with users, we conducted a competitive analysis of four platforms: Spotify, BeReal, Locket, and LoveBox.
By examining their strengths, weaknesses, and key functionalities, we gained insights into what works well, where they fall short, and how they engage their users.
01.
Personalization Drives Deeper Engagement – Platforms that adapt content and experiences based on individual user data tend to foster stronger emotional connections and higher retention. Personalized interactions make users feel understood and valued, encouraging repeated use.
02.
Collaboration & Shared Experiences Create Stronger Engagement- Apps that allow direct interaction or shared content creation tend to sustain user engagement better.
03.
Incentives & Notifications Keep Users Coming Back- FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) plays a key role in engagement. Push notifications and time-sensitive interactions are big for engagement. Apps that don’t effectively remind users or create a reason to return risk lower retention.
After conducting in-depth interviews to explore how people emotionally connect to past experiences through sensory memory, we expanded our research with a broader survey to quantify these insights and prioritize key features. Our goal with the survey was to:
Identify patterns in how different age groups engage with memory preservation tools.
Understand which sensory triggers (sight, sound, smell, etc.) are most effective for recalling emotional moments.
Prioritize features that users find most valuable in a sensory memory application.
The survey not only reinforced key findings from our interviews, such as the importance of reflection over routine and the need for customizable memory-sharing options. But it also revealed new insights that shaped our design direction. Specifically, we discovered:
Specifically, we discovered ↴
A divide in privacy preferences, with users equally split between keeping memories private vs. sharing with close friends.
An untapped opportunity in voice memos, which many users don’t currently use but see potential value in.
A strong demand for a centralized memory hub, where users can store and access photos, voice recordings, notes, and videos in one place.
To ensure our design effectively meets user needs, we conducted in-depth interviews with 14 participants across a diverse age range (15-60+ years old). Our goal was to understand how people preserve, recreate, and emotionally connect to past experiences using technology.
Users strongly associate memories with sound, visuals, and even scents. Integrating voice notes, photos, and contextual sensory cues enhances recall and nostalgia.
Users don’t want memory preservation to feel like a daily chore. Instead, they prefer event-based prompts (e.g., “It’s been a year since this moment… want to revisit it?”).
Features like streaks or memory “unboxing” encourage engagement, but users don’t want excessive gamification that makes memory-keeping feel like an obligation.
Design values were established to help us stay aligned with the core purpose and vision of the product. They kept us focused on what really matters, preventing us from getting distracted by unnecessary features or trends.
Next, we translated these ideas into more concrete application features, identifying which concepts best aligned with our goals. This involved prioritizing functionalities that would effectively capture and enhance sensory memories, ensuring the app would deliver a meaningful and engaging user experience.
I developed low-fidelity wireframes to quickly test different approaches for memory logging, mood tracking, and emotional visualization. These sketches allowed me to focus on structure and interaction first, before investing in visual design.
We aimed to create a calming and nostalgic brand identity that reflects the emotional nature of reliving memories. To guide this, we developed mood boards that inspired our choices in typography, color, and sizing. Thoughtful branding is essential to evoke the right feelings and create a cohesive, inviting experience for users.
We conducted usability testing to evaluate early prototypes, focusing on how users navigated the app, logged memories, and interacted with visual elements. These sessions helped validate core interactions and informed the next round of design iterations.
Logging a Memory ↴
Findings:
Users weren’t sure where to start logging a memory.
Steps in the flow felt unclear.
Uploading photos/media was confusing.
Design Response:
Added a clear entry point for starting a log.
Simplified the step-by-step flow and hierarchy.
Clarified patterns for multi-media uploads.
Orb Day ↴
Findings
Users were confused by the Orb data and what the visuals represented.
Some misinterpreted emotional prompts (e.g., thinking they should feel a specific emotion).
The emotional timeline felt abstract and unclear.
Design Response
Clarified data visualization and labels.
Refined emotional cues for consistency.
Improved hierarchy to make next steps obvious.
Confusing hierarchy made it hard for users to know where to start.
Personal and emotional elements made the app feel more meaningful.
Orb colors on the calendar were too subtle to easily show emotion.
The purple background felt unsettling due to mood-color associations.
Meet Orb!
Orb Overview - Welcome, Home, Calendar
Onboarding
Logging a Memory
Designing Orb helped me grow as both a product thinker and a storyteller. I learned how to structure a system that feels personal without being overwhelming, build emotional safety into UI flows, and use color, music, and micro-interactions in ways that support reflection rather than pull users away from it.
Presenting this work to industry professionals was one of the most meaningful parts of the process. Their feedback helped confirm the real-world potential of the concept and pushed me to refine the design’s clarity, accessibility, and emotional depth. Orb became a demonstration of how thoughtful, human-centered design can support mental wellness in a simple but powerful way.