RECALL
Your AI memory companion that grows with you.
Date: October 2025 – December 2025
My Role: Solo UX/UI Designer — research, concept testing, wireframing, UI design, prototyping
Project Type: Senior Capstone Project
Tools: Figma, Adobe Creative Suite, Google Forms
Deliverables: Survey research, personas, lo-fi wireframes, hi-fi UI system, interactive prototype, longitudinal concept test
THE PROBLEM
We live in a world that generates more information per day than any previous generation — meetings, conversations, names, places, ideas, moments. And yet most people have no reliable system for holding onto any of it.
It's not about having a bad memory. It's about the fact that our brains were never designed to store everything — they were designed to prioritize. The problem is that what gets filtered out isn't always what we'd choose to forget.
A name from a networking event. What your professor said on Tuesday. The café where you had that conversation that changed how you thought about something. Gone — not because it wasn't meaningful, but because nothing connected it to anything.
Existing tools don't solve this. Notes apps require you to remember to open them. Reminders tell you when but not why. Photo libraries give you images with no context. None of them work the way memory actually works — through association, through place, through people, through emotion.
That's the gap Recall was designed to fill.
The design question I kept coming back to throughout this project:
How might we help people record, organize, and recall their daily experiences — not just as data points, but as connected, meaningful moments they can actually retrieve?
Research: Understanding the Problem First
Before designing anything, I needed to validate that this problem was real — not just something I assumed people experienced,
but something they actually felt and struggled with daily.
The Survey
I ran a structured survey through Google Forms targeting a mix of students and young professionals — people whose days are dense with information, interactions, and context that's easy to lose track of. The goal wasn't to ask people if they'd use a memory app. The goal was to understand how and where forgetting was actually happening in their lives, and what — if anything — they were doing about it.
Around 15 people responded. The results were more telling than I expected.
What the data showed:
85% said they struggle with memory most in work or school contexts — not personal life. This immediately shifted my thinking. The problem wasn't nostalgia or sentimentality. It was functional, daily, high-stakes forgetting.
92% said they don't use any dedicated tool to help them remember things. No system, no habit, no app. They were relying entirely on their brain — and it wasn't working.
70% said they forget names and conversations most frequently. Not tasks or deadlines — the human layer of their day. The people they met, what was said, the context around an interaction.
What surprised me most was that the gap wasn't awareness — people knew they were forgetting. The gap was that nothing available felt natural enough to actually use consistently. The friction of existing tools was higher than the pain of forgetting, so people just accepted the loss.
What users said they needed most:
Based on follow-up responses, two features rose clearly to the top — smart contextual reminders and a visual memory timeline. Not a better notes app. Something that connected their experiences over time and surfaced them back at the right moment.
This directly shaped the two core pillars of Recall's design: the Timeline as the structural heart of the app, and the AI Ask feature as the retrieval layer.
Survey Data: A Closer Look
The numbers behind those headlines tell a more detailed story.
Over 90% of respondents said they lose track of events "sometimes" or "often" — making this nearly universal, not a niche complaint.
When asked what they do when they forget, 64.3% default to phone notes or calendar apps — not because those tools work, but because nothing better exists. And when asked how satisfied they are with those tools: 50% neutral, 33% unsatisfied. Nobody said "very satisfied."
That's the real gap. Not a lack of awareness. Not a lack of trying. A lack of anything worth the habit.
HOW THE APP SOLVES THE PROBLEM
The app strengthens memory by turning everyday moments into connected, retrievable experiences. It listens, organizes, and reminds. Building a digital version of your memory that evolves with you.
WHO I DESIGNED FOR
MARY, RETIRED TEACHER, 65
Mary lives independently, stays active, and wants to stay sharp. She doesn't struggle with memory the way someone with a condition might — she just notices the small gaps. A conversation from last week. What she did on a particular Tuesday. Details that feel just out of reach.
What she needs: Simplicity and emotional comfort. Technology that feels reassuring, not clinical. Something that brings memories back gently rather than demanding she input data constantly.
How this shaped Recall: Mary is the reason the "On This Day" feature exists — a passive, surfaced memory that appears without the user having to do anything. She's also why the onboarding was designed to feel warm and personal rather than functional and cold.
JOHN, FINANCIAL ANALYST, 28
John's day is back-to-back. Meetings, gym, social plans, networking events — all running together. He doesn't forget because he's careless. He forgets because his brain is at capacity and nothing is capturing the overflow.
What he needs: Speed. He can't stop mid-meeting to type a note. He needs to capture a moment in seconds — a voice note, a name, a place — and trust that something will organize it for him later.
How this shaped Recall: John is the reason voice logging became a core input method, and why the Home screen shows a daily overview the moment you open the app — no searching, no scrolling. Just: here's what happened yesterday/today.
DR. JAMES, PROFESSOR, 45
Dr. James operates across multiple worlds simultaneously — lectures, client work, family. His forgetting is contextual: he loses the thread between his professional and personal life. A deadline buried under a lecture note. A follow-up he meant to make after a meeting.
What he needs: Structure that connects different areas of his life without requiring him to manually maintain it. Smart summaries. Context-aware reminders.
How this shaped Recall: Dr. James is the reason the Tasks feature connects to the Timeline rather than existing as a standalone to-do list. And why the AI Ask feature was designed to retrieve context — not just remind, but explain.
THE CONCEPT VALIDATION TEST
Most app concepts get tested once — a quick usability session, a few clicks through a prototype, a thumbs up or down. I wanted to test something harder: not whether people could use Recall, but whether the core idea behind it actually worked.
Could structured, connected memory logging help someone retain the details of their day — not just hours later, but weeks and months later?
To find out, I ran a longitudinal concept test over 10 months.
THE METHOD
I worked with one participant — a busy student and young professional who matched the target user profile closely. Someone whose days were full, whose memory was constantly being asked to hold more than it comfortably could, and who had no existing system for capturing what happened to them.
This wasn't a prototype test. The app didn't exist yet as a working product. What I was testing was the logic of Recall — the core behavior the app would eventually be built around.
Here's what I asked them to do:
On a chosen day, they would:
Write out the key events of that day in structured form — what happened, where they went, who they met
Connect those personal events to real external anchors that actually occurred on that same date — a football match that was played, a news story that broke, a movie that released, a place they physically visited that day, all based on the user’s interests.
The anchors had to be real and verifiable — things that existed in the world on that specific day, not invented or generalized interests.
The Logic
If you can tie your personal memory to something that happened in the world that day, you create multiple entry points into the same moment. Remember one thing — the match result, the weather, a headline, and it pulls everything else connected to that day back up with it.
Then I checked back at two intervals:
At 1 week — Could they recall the details of that day without referring back to their notes?
At 1 month — Same question. Same day. What did they still remember?
DESIGN PROCESS
Research told me what people needed. The next step was figuring out how that translates into something usable, and that meant starting rough before going polished.
I started with lo-fi wireframes, sketching out the core flows before touching any UI tool. At this stage I wasn't thinking about color or type — I was solving structural problems: Where does memory logging live? How does someone get from "I want to log this moment" to "this moment is saved and connected" in the fewest steps possible?
The early sketches focused on three core questions:
What's the first thing a user sees when they open the app? It had to answer "what happened today" instantly — not require navigation to find out.
How do we make logging fast enough that people actually do it? Every extra tap was a reason someone wouldn't bother. This is what pushed voice logging from "a feature" to "the primary input."
Where do connected memories live? This became the foundation for the Timeline structure — not a list, but a connected, scrollable thread.