Memory Lane

Create lasting memories

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Inspiration

Learning about your history, and the history of the friend or family circles you are a part of can be difficult without either documenting your life online or paying a service like Ancestry to do the discovery for you. An intuitive and easy to maintain private social media service or journal could go a long way in helping people keep records of their cherished memories and pass their history down to their descendants.

What it does

Memory Lane is an interactive, living and collaborative photobook, uniquely presented in a timeline format, that lets you reminisce and look back on important life events and milestones {that have made you and your group, the way they are today/uniquely to your group}. Events can be added and placed on the scrollable timeline, thereby allowing users to easily take a trip down memory lane or share new photos and stories to be nostalgic about in the future.

Features:

  • The timeline shows all your events in chronological order, displaying a picture, title and description of the event.
  • To reminisce on any event, click on the event to show more information. This may include a more detailed description of the event, photos, and comments from group members who were also reminiscing!
  • Add and edit content individually (Event title and description, add images and videos). Invitation to edit through link share.
  • View specific events in the timelines by filtering on the time, tag or person.

How we built it

We built the frontend with ReactJS and React-Chronos to provide visualisation elements for the timeline and user content. Visual and UX designs for the user interface were prototyped in Figma and Adobe Creative Suite.
Our web interface connects with a Fastify + NodeJS web server on the backend to organise and serve timeline posts. Content is stored as documents to align with the social media post format and fetched from a MongoDB cloud instance.

Challenges we ran into

We pivoted to the private journal-keeping concept from one that was aimed at memorialising people who have passed away and needed to adapt our use cases and underlying purpose to suit. The memorial was originally to feature a family tree view to provide a “living link” to surviving family which we later adapted to the timeline view to streamline development complexity, however our choice of database will allow basic graph queries to support future relation tree storage.

In addition to the dynamic nature of our concept, all of us needed to learn the ins and outs of the React extensions used for visualising the photobook format, which complicated planning for the web interface and underlying services.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We count materialising our idea as a functional prototype in the limited time provided as our most significant accomplishment. In addition, many of us learned to develop resilience and alternative problem-solving approaches to overcome the technical challenges encountered while improving our ability to coordinate development across multiple areas.

What we learned

  • The importance of CSS naming conventions
  • A greater understanding of React
  • Designer to developer communication flow
  • Getting the balance between planning and implementation right to develop within the time limit while preserving future scalability.

What's next for Memory Lane

While serving a decently sized niche, Memory Lane could gain a much wider appeal if it were to introduce privacy-oriented interaction and more avenues for collaboration with friends or family when creating content. A privacy focus would make Memory Lane competitive with legacy social media (Facebook, Instagram) and appeal to those who are concerned with Facebook’s privacy and security practices or prefer a more intimate and personal setting to document their lives.

In the short term, adjustments to the loading and caching algorithm can be made to improve responsiveness and adapt the application for mobile use. More complex timeline options and content customisation features could also encourage time and emotional investment in the memories hosted on the platform.

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