StoryCache

About

StoryCache is an augmented-reality Android application that allows members of a community to share and experience stories tied to physical locations.
I worked on a team of three to design, implement, and test the application.


User Research

Through direct observation and personal experience, we noted that members of our community at Teachers College seemed to maintain the same social circles and lacked interaction with those unlike themselves.

Problem

From this observation, we identified the following problem:

Members of the Teachers College community lack the motivation and interest necessary to spark interaction with those unlike themselves.

Goal

We defined a goal for our application in order to address this problem:

We aim to connect users to their environment and to each other through sharing stories tied to familiar locations.

Next Steps

We identified the features necessary to create a minimum viable product (MVP): identifying a user’s surroundings and sharing a story associated with those surroundings.

Process

We utilized an Agile Scrum framework to design and implement our MVP and incrementally add features and changes as we acquired new insights and developed the application’s design.

StoryCacheTrello

Result

StoryCache comes preloaded with 8 original narratives, each tied to a different location near Columbia’s campus.

Adding on

In a future implementation, users will be able to upload their own location-based stories. This will further fuel our goal of connecting users by encouraging story-sharing.

Download

The Android application file (.apk) may be downloaded here.
To print your own copies of the target images to be scanned by the app, please click here.