Product DesignCross-Platform ArchitectureSystems Strategy

StoryCorps

Sole UX/UI Designer for a national mobile ecosystem redesign in partnership with NPR. The project was catalyzed by a critical architectural failure: the recording flow lacked a robust recovery path, resulting in data loss for a digital archive. I overhauled the end-to-end recording experience to implement zero-loss session recovery and collapsed a 7-step onboarding friction point into a streamlined, high-conversion flow. By architecting for "forgiveness by design," I delivered a stable, accessible experience that maintained a 4.6★ App Store rating through the surge of a national launch.

Role

Sole UX/UI Designer

Team

1 Design Director · NPR Stakeholders

Company

StoryCorps

Timeline

6 weeks / 2021

Tools

Figma · WCAG 2.1 AA Audits

The Challenge

From Functional Utility to Human-Centric Product.

The existing application functioned as a technical utility without an established UX framework. This lack of design infrastructure resulted in a high-friction onboarding process and a recording flow that offered no protection against common mobile interruptions. With a national NPR partnership approaching, the challenge was to architect a cohesive user experience from the ground up—one that could withstand a massive surge in volume while ensuring the technology remained invisible to the user.

Architecting Forgiveness.

As the sole designer, I established the first formal UX standards for the platform. The strategy was "Reliability as a Core Brand Value." Since the app serves a wide demographic, including non-power users, the interface needed to be "forgiving" by default. I prioritized the engineering of a persistent session state, ensuring that backgrounding or accidental closures—which previously resulted in total data loss—became non-events for the user.

How It Got Built

Discover

Audit & Sentiment: Analyzed 150+ App Store reviews. Confirmed that "silent failures" and data loss were the primary drivers of user churn and negative sentiment.
Friction Mapping: Visualized the gap between user intent and action, identifying that the original 7-step onboarding was the single largest barrier to session starts.
NPR Brand Alignment: Defined the visual hierarchy for how the StoryCorps and NPR identities coexist, ensuring brand credibility for a national audience.

Design

Recovery-First Architecture: Established session resilience as the core UX requirement—incorporating local auto-saving and backgrounding logic into the initial wireframes.
Strategic Friction Removal: Relocated the account gate to the post-recording phase, allowing users to experience the product's value before being asked for data.
Unified Design Language: Standardized a single source of truth for both platforms, providing explicit documentation for interrupt handling and state changes.

Ship

Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partnered directly with the engineering team to adapt design logic in real-time as platform-specific constraints surfaced.
Inclusive Design Standards: Executed a full accessibility audit (WCAG 2.1 AA), enforcing 44px touch targets and optimized screen-reader paths for an older demographic.
Final Quality Assurance: Owned the visual and functional sign-off for both platforms, ensuring the experience remained stable through the national launch.

Key Design Decisions

Users record their stories immediately and create an account only when they are ready to save. The Trade-off: Delayed user retention data in exchange for immediate product value. The ROI: Eliminated the highest-friction drop-off point in the funnel and prioritized the "intent-to-record" moment.

Prioritized visual reassurance and recovery paths over a simplified recording screen. The Trade-off: A slightly denser interface in exchange for absolute session resilience. The ROI: A lost story is a total loss of trust; architectural resilience was chosen over aesthetic minimalism to ensure data integrity for every user.

Standardized a single source of truth for both iOS and Android rather than maintaining two divergent sets of native components. The Trade-off: Accepted minor platform deviations to ensure deployment velocity. The ROI: Created a scalable, language-agnostic framework that allowed for a 1:1 consistent experience across a fragmented device landscape.

What Got Redesigned

Onboarding/Register — Before & After

Before

After — Redesigned Flow

Create Account

Pick Interests

Finish Profile

Check Email

Home

The old flow asked users to create an account before hearing a single word of their own voice. This one doesn't. Three steps to recording, zero friction gates.

Recording Screen — Before & After

Before

After — Complete Recording Process

Prepare

Questions

Record

Photos

Select Images

Description

Privacy

Preview

Published!

A dropped call used to mean a lost story. The redesign solved this by transforming a fragile audio utility into a resilient, guided multimedia archive. By integrating question preparation and photo prompts directly into a persistent, auto-saving session, the architecture protects the entire storytelling process. Interruptions are now recoverable by default—ensuring the focus stays on the narrative, not the technology.

Listen Feed

Read Transcript

Filter Stories

The original app treated content discovery as a secondary feature. I redesigned the Listen Feed into a dynamic, social-style interface to surface community-shared recordings. By integrating inline playback, synchronized transcripts, and a comprehensive filtering architecture (indexing by date, keyword, community, location, and language), the platform evolved from a personal recording utility into a highly discoverable public archive.

User Profile

My Profile

My Questions

Collections

Interview counts, collections, saved questions — a personal archive that grows with every conversation recorded.

What Shipped

4.6★iOS App Store rating held through NPR launch, user volume tripled

3onboarding steps (from 7)

2platforms, 1 shared component system

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