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
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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