DearDays GUI
An Automatic Journal Chronicles Your Days
DearDays automatically turns your daily moments into a personal journal with insightful infographic, it can not only save much time chronicling your days but help you know yourself better in seconds.
Competitors: Move, Nike+, Human
Where DearDays Came From
At this time, Andy started to run in the morning to challenge himself. in order to tack the progress, he bought a Nike+ SportWatch GPS to track his runs and help him reach the goals. It's really convencient and helpful to have app like this, and we thought this kind of automatic apps would be the latest trends of mobile apps.
So we wanted to create an app which people didn't have to spend much time dealing with contents, just like Move, Nike+ or Heyday, what people had to do was to bring their iPhones and did activities such as walked or took photos like they used to do, and the app would collect the information and turned them into beautiful inforgraphic automatically to help them lead a better life.
Wireframes of DearDays
Concept Development
It looks like DearDays has four different features, in fact, they are connected to one another. You can access to other features by tapping icons to see the overall statiscs of each month instantly.
1. Photo Calendar
The most popluar feature of CC.Days is the photo calendar. Users, especially Japanese users, love photo calendars so much that you still can see many photo calendars shared on Instagram at the end of each month. So we put the photo calendar in DearDays again to help people know their lives by just a glance. Those little grids encourage people to keep taking photos everyday to fill all the spots up to feel alive. When all the grids are full of photos, people feel sense of fullfillment and have courage to keep moving on to the next month.
The most popluar feature of CC.Days is the photo calendar. Users, especially Japanese users, love photo calendars so much that you still can see many photo calendars shared on Instagram at the end of each month. So we put the photo calendar in DearDays again to help people know their lives by just a glance. Those little grids encourage people to keep taking photos everyday to fill all the spots up to feel alive. When all the grids are full of photos, people feel sense of fullfillment and have courage to keep moving on to the next month.
2. My Path
Stick to the concept of "automatic journal," we put a twist on photos to arrange them into beautiful photo collages and create an awesome timeline with photos to the places people have visited automatically. People don't have to spend much time editing photos, adding time and geolocation information, all they have to do is a little editing to complete the stories.
3. Mood Log
In addition to photos and path, mood is also an important factor in peoples' lives. Sometimes an emoticon speaks louder than hundreds of words, so we decide to add Moon Log to DearMood and people can swipe up or down to to record their daily moods instantly.
4. Inspiring Journal
Journal entries here are indentical to the notes in My Path, so people can view a timeline with photo collages and geolocation information or pure texts. If people don't take any photos, they can still be greeted with journal prompts to help them write down their feelings and thoughts.
DearDays GUI - Draft
GUI Design
Still we follow the flat design and try to use colors to help users distinguish different features. The original version is too colorful and crowded with information, after reviewing the design, we pull out important elements to make it simpler.
DearDays Got Featired By Apple
Get Featured by Apple
DearDays was not only featured as "Best New App," "Best of April by Apple," "Day on the Town," "New Year New You" and "Best Apps Made in Taiwan," but also got lots of media coverage such as MacSource, PunNode, BGR, Zuimeia and so on.
DearDays also won the second prize of Lifestyle Apps in 2014 Chinese Best Apps held by Unalis Corporation. Compared to other winners such as BeeTalk or Clean Master, we felt so proud to be part of the list since we only had two persons.
New Design of DearDays
New Designs for DearDays
Some major usability issues were identified, and more suggestions on GUI design are provided. We always loved to hear about all kinds of comments and started to work on the new design.
By pulling out the overview statics bar hidden below the photo calendar, we put the overview statics as the first page. This design would help users get a better understanding of each metric and take actions more quickly. Otherwise, we would love to replace those pure color backgrounds of inforgraphics with users' photos to make the GUI more cleaner and immersive.
Brief Summary
When designing DearDays, we were so greedy that we wanted everything related to the memory to be built inside the app to wow ouer users. This is a common mistake to avoid because you will miss the point of your product and confuse your users easily. Gradaully we realize the importance of staying focused and the best practice of focusing on one thing is validated in our next product: Loop Journal.
