Idea Development - 'The Year I Was Born'

To help identify the full scale of this idea I have written an App Definition Statement (as recommended in Apple's iOS guidelines) which outlines the purpose and functionality of the app:
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The Year I Was Born

An Interactive iPad app

Our lives as stories

With the proliferation of social networking and ubiquitous computing we are increasingly broadcasting our personal narratives in cyber space, thus creating digital records of our life stories. But these stories are only limited to the time in which we first encountered these platforms of self-representation, and many of us do not have an idea of where our stories began…

What if there was a way to reconstruct the first chapter of our life story and allow people to re-live some of the key events from their birth year? What if we could digitize our first-year photographs and preserve these important memories forever? What if all of this could be achieved using an iPad app?

The Year I Was Born

This interactive iPad app allows the user to access a wide range of content from the year of their birth, including major news stories, fashion trends, technological breakthroughs, music and film releases. The media-rich interface, organised as a navigable timeline, enables the user to experience the story of the year of their birth, contextualizing the beginning of their life-story with mainstream cultural events of the time.

Selecting a year

The main menu on opening the app consists of a chronological list of years arranged in a bar horizontally across the top of the screen. The user can scroll through this list until they reach the year of their birth. Once the relevant year has been selected, a secondary menu will appear giving options for which categories of content is to be included on the timeline.

Applying content filters

The categories can be broadened or condensed using filters, which limit the types of content that are displayed in the timeline. For example, if a user is particularly interested in what songs were released the year they were born they can de-select all other categories so that only the ‘music’ option is checked. This will restrict the timeline to display content relevant to this category. At any time, if a user wishes to add more categories they can do so by selecting the relevant options and the content on the timeline will be updated accordingly.

Categories to be included are: World Events, Local Events, Sport, Music, Movies, Literature, Art, Fashion, Technology and Celebrity.

Timeline assets

Assets on the timeline consist of videos, photographs, text and sound files relating to the categories available in the selected year. The user has control over which assets they view/experience in full and which they pass by as they navigate the timeline. The experience can be personalised by ‘favouriting’ individual content and saving it to the users own profile, in effect creating a sub-timeline of chosen assets. This will appear in a similar layout to Facebook’s timeline, and ultimately users will be able to integrate this with other social networking profiles.

Adding personal assets

Users have the option to upload their own assets to their personal timelines. These can be in the form of family photographs, film footage, newspaper announcements; anything that is related to the year they were born. They then have the option to publish this content to the main timeline so that it is viewable by other users (however, like all other content this will have a category assigned to it on the menu so that users can choose whether they see personal assets on the main timeline).

Navigation controls

Navigating the app relies primarily on the touchscreen technology of the iPad. Users can scroll up and down the timeline until they come across an asset that interests them. To make an asset occupy the whole screen the user needs to drag the item so that it is positioned in the centre of the timeline. Once it is in the right position it will automatically enter full-screen mode. To return back to the timeline the user just needs to swipe up or down on the screen, and the asset will return to its usual size (and place) on the timeline. To ‘favourite’ an item (which saves it to the users personal timeline) the user double-taps the relevant asset on the timeline.

The Target Audience

Initially it would seem that the target audience for my app is very broad - in a literal sense it is an idea that could appeal to everyone. We were all born and to some extent have a shared interest in what life was like in the particular year of our birth. I think it is less appealing to children and adolescents, as younger people tend to have more of an interest in what is happening now. Therefore I would suggest that the target age for users of my app is males and females aged 16+, specifically from a middle to upper class upbringing (indicative of them being able to afford an iPad) with a tendency to use social networking during their leisure time.

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