Stories are one of the most powerful tools for connecting people and ideas. They serve as a bridge for connection, an instrument for learning and create an emotional resonance that shapes our perspective.

But as important as stories are, they have somewhat lost their place in our personal lives. Within our own circles, the mechanism of delivery for stories has largely remained the same: with small groups of people sitting together in a room. That way of sharing is really intimate but super limited. 

To explore this space, we wanted to think about how we could amplify people's stories and give them a better medium to share. From there, we began working on a storytelling app that gives anybody a way to record short form audio stories and connect with listeners. This type of content fit neatly into a media landscape where podcasts are a major time investment, Youtube videos require more concentration and other social applications are too big of a distraction.

As we began to work on this opportunity, we placed an extra emphasis on developing a set of Guiding Principles for the product decisions we'd make. For example, one of our guiding principles was "Equalizing Discoverability", which meant that each content creator should have an equal chance of getting their stories discovered by users regardless of their current following.

To me, this is one of the most challenging and exciting things to do as a designer. The process of translating abstract principles into concrete interfaces and interactions is often where the best design work happens.

After defining these core principles and design approach, we started to think about what the application might look like. We were very deliberate when thinking about the balance between conforming to existing design patterns to help breed familiarity versus creating something that is more unique but might deviate from user expectations.

We gradually progressed from low fidelity wireframes to high fidelity prototypes. After experimenting with different interfaces, we developed high fidelity prototypes that we felt accurately represented what we wanted the application to look and feel like. We aimed to strike a balance between an interface that would be comfortable for users to understand, but also different than other audio apps in the market.