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Getting a premium hand written note is something many people have never experienced. I actually got my first design internship by giving the CEO of the company, Artisense, one of these premium hand written notes. He was blown away!
A hand written note is everything an email is not. It has texture, personality, elegance, color, and most of all, swagger.
Today's technology makes this lost art possible once more.
Solo Project, tasks included:
UX/UI, Graphic Design, User Research,
Videography, Motion Graphics, Video Editing
Lighting, Illustration
User Research
Senior Thesis Project
Figma, Illustrator, After Effects, Premiere
13+
Sending mail is such a hassle!
If I want to send someone a premium hand written card, I have to:
It's no wonder people don't want to go through the hassle of sending snail mail any more!
Create an app where you can send handwritten notes from your phone. The whole process shouldn't be much harder than sending an email.
I conducted a survey with 39 responses to gain user insights into their experiences with traditional mail.
From my survey, I found that people really like hand writing because it adds a personal touch, and that typed letters and emails are cold feeling. When given the choice, people always prefer hand written, so this means that the Apple Pencil can be a great tool for adding a personal touch to something digital, and without having to leave that digital experience.
My survey shows that in today’s world, mail is no longer considered a form of everyday communication. This is mostly due to the huge gap between mail and email in terms of how easy and fast they are, but what if sending a personal letter was as easy as sending an email? What if all the barriers to entry for mail were taken out of the picture?
When it comes to the subject of business relationships, thank you notesare very important. My grandma sent thank you notes every time shereceived something and also kept a gift ledger in her Rolodex, and thisis one of the reasons she is one of the most popular people I know. There is room for concern that people are not really sending out thankyou notes anymore. My solution will solve this problem.
Addresses are awkward and outdated. They are so old that it is no longer customary to ask for peoples address unless you need to physically visit them, or send them something. This is what hap-pens whenever I try to send someone a gift:
My survey shows that this scenario is not unique to myself. People feel a need to know why someone needs to know their physical location, and this is a barrier to being surprised. The element of surprise is very important for gift giving so this acts as a barrier to proper gifts.
As far as gift giving goes, it is nearly impossible to send someone a gift without ruining the surprise.
The same thing happens whenever I try to send a thank you note. I had an interview once in a café, and I wanted to send the person interviewing me a thank you note. But when I left the interview, I felt it was too weird to call the guy right after he interviewed me, so I never got his address and I never sent him a thank you note. I had every intention to, but it just never happened.
Part of the problem is people no longer keep address books or record addresses in their phone.
Email is a much safer option for communication than mail because knowing where someone lives is no longer essential for communication.
To make things worse, people are still having this problem:
Not only is email psychologically safer, it is also much easier.
All of these steps for mail make it prohibitively difficult to send gifts and letters through mail.
It is socially acceptable to exchange facebooks or emails, but where you live is socially taboo.
It's is not socially acceptable to ask for a person’s address if you just met them.
Not knowing people’s addresses has actually prevented them from giving out gifts!
Even if a person already knows an address, that doesn’t mean they will ever get around to actually sending the letter or gift.
To cap it all off, it is uncomfortable for may people to even ask for another person’s address.
As we can see from all of these survey results, addresses get in theway of gift giving. My solution solves this by making the process ofsending a letter as easy as sending an email for the end user.
Legend has it that Picasso used to pay for bills and food with drawings on napkins.
Its clear that there is something very appealing about the physicality and personality of anything written or drawn by hand.
When asked, people would greatly value receiving anything hand written, especially by someone who is more on the artistic side.
In this project, I created personas to represent different kinds of users and their struggles with traditional mail. These personas turned complex user data into understandable characters that I could relate to. This approach helped me design a solution that meets the needs of various users, addressing their specific problems effectively.
I designed several different type of notes with different price points. Each note has 4 customizable features, the graphic, the string, the paper and the wax seal. I chose to have wax seals and string because although not nessessary, my reasearch told me that a big part of creating a more premium feel was texture.
To make a compelling note concept, I created all of the artwork in the Paper53 app on an ipad using an apple pencil.
For this project, I tested a bunch of different colors of wax seals. I asked my local art store if they had any was seal scraps, and they actually did.
This is the produce aspect of the app. Users can pick the letter type they want, and then can further customize the letter based on its type. They have control over the artwork, the paper, the envelope, and the wax seal. These are sorted from most expensive to least expensive.
My process starts off with sketches then I make some basic screens in figma.
When you submit the recipient's email, this form will be generated and will be sent to the recipients email by the Gift App server. The recipient's mailing address will be hidden from the sender.
This allows the user to be able to send mail without needing to go through the awkward act of retrieving their address.
Additionally, the person on the receiving end can opt into letting the gift app remember their address, son anyone in the future can send mail to them.
This is the diagram showing how the service works for sending mail to someone without knowing their address.
To make everything appear simple in the video, it took quite a bit of planning.
In order to get a clean looking background for the I needed to figure out the lighting, the framing, and a way to hold the phone still while filming.
This video shows me practicing where to touch the screen. I actually had to record the same sequence twice, once with just a green screen on the phone screen to capture my hands, and then another where I just did a screen capture.
I edited the video in premier and after effects. I first started in premier to plan out which clips I would play when, then I did all of the special effects like motion tracking and chroma-keying out the green screen in after effects.
(skip forward 30 seconds to skip the intro and go straight to the app animation)
