Lived
Overview
Lived is a mobile app concept designed to help early career adults turn vague intentions into real experiences they actually follow through on. It combines personalized discovery, planning support, lightweight reflection, and a private archive to help users build a life that feels more intentional, memorable, and actually lived.
Lived began as a capstone thesis project about helping young adults live more intentionally. Through research and three rounds of testing, I found that users did not need another inspiration feed. They needed help choosing, planning, committing, and following through.
The final prototype evolved into a fuller intentional living system with personalized discovery, planning support, commitment tools, Receipts of Life, a private archive, and Life Wrapped insights. The project ended as both a high-fidelity mobile prototype and a public graduation exhibition where visitors could reflect, try the product, and take home real experience prompts.
Why I Made This
A lot of the best parts of my life came from saying yes to something unfamiliar.
When I was 18, I moved from Chicago to Los Angeles. I knew no one, had very little money, and mostly followed a feeling that it was something I needed to do. I ended up in Venice, living in a creative house, meeting people I never would have met otherwise, and stepping into experiences that changed the direction of my life.
Over time, I noticed a pattern. The most memorable parts of my life usually did not come from staying comfortable. They came from trying something new, going somewhere unfamiliar, meeting new people, taking risks, and following curiosity before I had every detail figured out.
Those choices gave me memories, confidence, opportunities, and a clearer sense of who I was becoming. Lived came from wanting to design for that kind of movement: the moment where someone stops waiting for “someday” and actually steps into a fuller version of their life.
Context
The project was built around a tension between imagined life and actual time.
In my presentation, I framed this through the idea of an average life being around 4,000 weeks. Most of that time is already spoken for by sleeping, working, eating, commuting, errands, and basic maintenance. The free time left over is limited, but it is easy for that time to disappear into passive routines.
One statistic helped make that tension concrete: Americans aged 15 and older spent an average of about five hours per day on leisure activities in 2024, and 2.60 of those hours went to watching TV. The point was not that TV is bad. The point was that people often have some free time, but that time does not always become the kind of life they say they want.
The opportunity was to design a product that helps people turn limited free time into experiences that feel personally meaningful, without framing life as another thing to optimize.
Design Challenge
The design challenge was to make intentional living feel specific, realistic, and actionable without turning the product into a productivity app.
Lived needed to feel emotionally meaningful without becoming vague. It needed to support follow through without becoming another task manager. The goal was to help people do more of what matters, without making life feel like something to optimize.
Research
The research for Lived had three main parts: behavioral science research, competitive and digital signal research, and primary testing with young adults. Together, these helped me ground the concept in more than personal intuition.
Behavioral Science Research
I looked at research around experiences, anticipation, novelty, memory, regret, follow through, and narrative identity. The most useful part of that research was not just what it said, but how it translated into design decisions.
Experiences create lasting value. Research on experiential purchases suggests that experiences are often remembered more positively, become part of identity, and carry more social value than material purchases. For Lived, this meant the product should stay centered on real world action, not digital rewards, badges, or abstract goals.
Anticipation is part of the payoff. Looking forward to an experience can be rewarding on its own. That made planning more than a logistics problem. The planning flow needed to make the experience feel closer, more real, and worth looking forward to.
Psychological richness is a real life orientation. A psychologically rich life is built through varied, interesting, and perspective changing experiences. This helped define the target user: someone who values novelty, aliveness, openness, and expansion.
Novelty matters. Research suggested that novelty is connected to motivation, life satisfaction, attention, and memory. That meant novelty should not just be a fun category. It should shape recommendations, challenge levels, and recap insights.
Long-term regret often centers on inaction. People may regret actions more in the short term, but in the long term they often regret missed opportunities and things they did not do. That connected directly to the “someday” problem at the center of Lived.
Identity is built through life stories. Narrative identity research helped validate the archive. If people make sense of themselves through the stories they build about their lives, then the archive is not just a place to store photos. It can help users see who they are becoming through the experiences they actually choose.
Competitive and Digital Signal Research
I looked at adjacent products that overlap with different parts of Lived, including The Nudge, Wanderlog, Polarsteps, Day One, Daylio, BucketList, and Finch.
Each product solved part of the problem, but none solved the full loop.
The Nudge showed the value of curated recommendations.
Wanderlog showed the value of making plans concrete and visual.
Polarsteps and Day One showed the emotional value of memory and private life capture.
Daylio showed that reflection needs to stay fast and lightweight.
Finch showed how much tone matters when a product deals with personal motivation.
The strongest gap I found was fragmentation. Existing products help people discover activities, organize logistics, journal, track moods, document travel, or list goals. But I did not find a strong product that connected meaningful discovery, commitment, follow through, reflection, and memory into one system.
That became the whitespace for Lived.
Lived sits between discovery apps, planning tools, journaling apps, memory archives, and aspiration based self improvement products. Its difference is that it is built around the full loop of intentional living through experience: find it, commit to it, do it, remember it, and build from it.
Digital Signal Scan
I also looked at Reddit, forums, App Store reviews, and online discussions where people talked more honestly about boredom, autopilot, wasted time, and wanting more from life.
The language people used was direct and emotional. People described “just existing instead of living,” feeling like life was passing by, living on autopilot, falling into “Groundhog Day,” and wondering what they were doing with their life.
This helped sharpen the tone of the project. The problem was not just organization. It was not just boredom. It was a deeper feeling that life can become repetitive, passive, and under lived.
The digital signal scan also showed that people do not want a huge generic list of options. They want curation, relevance, and help making something real. That directly shaped the product direction. Lived should not feel like Eventbrite, Yelp, Pinterest, or a bucket list. It should feel like a tool for living.
Process
The process moved from research and framing into journey mapping, prototype development, testing, iteration, and public exhibition. The main goal throughout was to make sure Lived did not stay at the level of a nice concept. It needed to become a product system that could actually help someone move from intention into action.
I started by defining the core product loop, then mapped the user journey around the main use case: a young adult feels stuck in routine, opens Lived because they want something more meaningful out of their week, chooses an experience, follows through, and captures it as part of a growing archive.
The journey map showed three risky moments.
First, recommendation quality. If suggestions felt generic, unrealistic, or out of touch, trust would drop quickly.
Second, commitment. Even if the user liked an idea, that did not mean they would do it. The product needed to create a stronger bridge between interest and action.
Third, reflection. If the post experience step felt too heavy, users would skip it. Reflection needed to be lightweight, but still meaningful enough to make the experience worth remembering.
The emotional arc also became clear: restlessness, curiosity, hope, commitment, presence, pride, and momentum. That arc helped shape the tone of the product. Lived is not only a utility tool. It is trying to shift how users feel about their own life.
MVP Scope
For the MVP, I focused on proving the core loop: can a user move from vague desire, to a recommended experience, to commitment, to reflection, to archive?
The MVP included:
Onboarding
Personal input
Curated recommendations
Experience detail pages
Commitment flow
Receipt of Life capture
Private archive
Return loop
I intentionally kept out full social features, public sharing, real booking/payment systems, heavy journaling, and broad life management tools. The goal was to prove the smallest complete version of the behavior change loop: helping someone move from vague desire into a real experience, then making that experience visible and worth remembering afterward.
Strategy
The first major design decision was to define Lived around a loop instead of a feed.
A feed of ideas would be easy to build, but it would not solve the real problem. The research kept pointing back to the same issue: discovery alone is not enough. People need help moving from inspiration into action, then turning that action into memory and momentum.
The core loop became Discover, Commit, Do, Reflect.
Discover: Find experiences that fit the user’s interests, mood, energy, budget, time, and desired level of challenge.
Commit: Turn intention into a real plan with enough detail to make follow through feel possible.
Do: Complete the experience in real life. This is the actual outcome of the product.
Reflect: Capture the experience as a Receipt of Life and add it to a private archive that shows momentum over time.
Design Principles
The final design principles were:
Help users act, not just aspire.
Make recommendations feel curated and personal.
Keep the flow low-friction.
Make planning feel motivating, not administrative.
Keep reflection lightweight but meaningful.
Treat the archive as core value, not storage.
Design for aliveness, not productivity.
These principles helped keep the product from drifting too far into either self help language or pure utility.
Privacy and Trust
Because Lived deals with personal memories, locations, reflections, and the way users spend their lives, privacy had to be part of the product direction. The MVP is private by default. There is no public social feed, and the archive is treated as a personal record, not content for performance.
That was important for the tone of the product. Lived should help users build a life that feels more intentional, not turn their life into another social platform.
Validation
Lived was shaped through three rounds of testing: early concept testing, guided reflection interviews, and high-fidelity prototype testing.
Across all rounds, the concept was easy for people to understand. The more important question was whether it could move from a compelling idea into a useful product. Each round helped sharpen that direction.
Round 1: Early Concept Test
The first test focused on whether the basic idea and flow made sense. I tested an early prototype with three people.
The concept landed quickly. Participants moved through the flow without much confusion and understood that the app was trying to help them choose something more meaningful to do with their week. The short flow worked because it was simple and not overwhelming.
The main weakness was recommendation quality. Participants understood the idea, but the suggested experiences needed to feel more personal, specific, and believable.
This gave me the first major design direction: the product could not rely on broad inspiration. It needed stronger personalization and clearer reasons behind recommendations.
Round 2: Guided Reflection Interviews
The second round was a 1:1 moderated interview study with four people. The goal was to validate the problem, not just the interface.
I wanted to know whether young adults actually related to the core tension behind the project: wanting a fuller, more intentional life, but falling into routine, convenience, fatigue, and low effort habits. The interviews started with current routines, then moved into unmet desires, aspirations, barriers, and finally reactions to the concept.
This round produced one of the most important insights in the project: the gap was not lack of desire. Participants usually had real desires. They wanted more travel, music, nature, social connection, creativity, adventure, challenge, and memorable experiences. The bigger issue was turning those desires into action.
One participant described it clearly: “It’s not so much as not knowing how to, but feeling like I don’t have the bandwidth to.” That quote changed the product direction. Lived could not just help people dream. It had to reduce the effort required to act.
The interviews also showed that meaningful experiences are personal. Participants described meaningful experiences in different ways, including music, nature, family healing, contribution, travel, relationships, creativity, connection, activation, variety, challenge, story making, identity, confidence, and becoming more fully themselves.
That meant the product could not assume one universal definition of “meaningful.” It had to help users define that for themselves.
The interview prompts also validated the role of reflection. Participants became more articulate as the conversation went on and surfaced things they had not fully named before. But the clearest takeaway was still action. One participant summed up the value of the concept in one line: “It makes it actionable.”
After this round, onboarding became more important, recommendation inputs expanded to include time, energy, budget, mood, social setting, and comfort zone, and the product language became more direct. Most importantly, the project shifted from helping users imagine a fuller life to helping them act on one.
Round 3: High-Fidelity Prototype Test
The third round tested the high-fidelity prototype with five participants. This test evaluated whether the product was clear, relevant, and actionable.
The prototype tested onboarding, the home experience, experience discovery, choosing an experience, commitment, archive/journaling, Life Wrapped, and overall concept clarity.
The concept still landed strongly. Participants understood the product quickly and described it as something that helps people live more intentionally, break out of routine, and do more meaningful things with their life.
Participants said things like, “This feels like something that could actually make people think bigger about their life,” “This feels like it’s about actually living your life, not just organizing it,” and “This feels bigger than just events or recommendations.”
That validated the positioning. The product was not being read as just another event discovery product.
Onboarding also worked well. Participants said it made the product feel personal rather than generic. It helped frame the app around a larger life question before asking users to browse recommendations.
The archive and Life Wrapped were strong differentiators. Participants liked the idea that experiences would become part of a larger record. These features helped shift the product from activity discovery into a system for seeing a life being built over time.
The main failure point was after selection. Across all five participants, users liked the inspiration, but wanted more help making the experience happen. They asked for cost, time required, location, transportation context, what to bring, effort level, best time to go, social context, preparation steps, a first next step, and clearer commitment.
This was the biggest turning point in the project. The prototype was strong at helping users imagine more. It needed to become stronger at helping them execute.
Participants said things like, “Once I pick something, I want the app to tell me how to actually make it happen,” “After I choose something, I want it to give me the roadmap,” “I need the app to help me after I pick the thing,” “It’s really strong on inspiration, but I still need help with the actual doing part,” and “If it can handle the logistics and planning part better, that’s where it becomes really valuable.”
That feedback directly shaped the final prototype.
Solution
The final prototype is organized around one core loop: choose, explore, commit, do, and reflect. Each stage is designed to move the user one step closer to a real experience, then help them remember what it meant afterward.
Choose: Onboarding
The experience starts with onboarding. Instead of immediately showing generic recommendations, Lived first asks users about what they want more of in life. This includes interests, energy, budget, comfort zone, social preferences, and the kinds of experiences that make them feel alive.
This came directly from research showing that meaningful experiences are subjective. The app cannot assume one definition of a good life. It has to help users define that for themselves.
Explore: Personalized Discovery
After onboarding, users move into discovery. They receive a curated set of experience recommendations designed to match their real context or gently stretch their comfort zone.
The final prototype includes stronger discovery controls because testing showed that users needed more ways to narrow down options. Filters include budget, time, effort, mood, social setting, and experience type.
The mood based search lets users describe what they want in more natural language, like “something relaxing near the beach” or “something weird to do with friends this weekend.” This makes the product more flexible without turning it into a generic search engine.
Commit: Planning and Follow Through
Once a user chooses an experience, Lived helps make it real. This is where the final prototype improved most after testing.
Each experience page includes what it is, why it fits, estimated cost, estimated time, location, effort level, best time to go, what to bring, and clear next steps. The goal is to lower friction. The user should leave this flow knowing what the experience is, why it fits, what it requires, and what they need to do first.
This is the point where Lived becomes more than inspiration.
Do: The Real World Experience
The real outcome of Lived happens outside the app. The product is not designed to keep users scrolling inside an interface. It is designed to help them leave the interface and actually do the thing they committed to.
The app supports that moment with planning context, reminders, and commitment, but the product only works if it leads to a real world experience.
Reflect: Receipts of Life
After completing an experience, the user creates a Receipt of Life. A Receipt of Life is a lightweight reflection artifact that captures what happened and why it mattered. It can include a short video or photo, a one line reflection, and simple dimensions like alive, meaning, and growth.
This keeps reflection from becoming homework. The goal is to capture enough meaning that the moment becomes easier to remember and revisit.
Archive: Memory, Patterns, and Life Wrapped
The receipt is saved into a private archive. Over time, those receipts build into a record of the user’s life.
The archive shows completed experiences, media, reflections, patterns, stats, and emotional data over time. Life Wrapped turns those moments into recap insights, such as top moments, new things tried, places explored, awe moments, comfort zone expansion, chapter progress, and reflection patterns.
This is the long-term value of the product. It turns individual experiences into memory, identity, and momentum.
Key Features
Personalized Onboarding
The onboarding flow helps users define what they want more of before the app recommends anything. It asks about interests, energy, budget, comfort zone, social preferences, and the kinds of experiences that feel meaningful to the user.
Curated Experience Discovery
Lived gives users a curated set of experiences rather than a giant open feed. Recommendations are meant to feel specific, believable, and worth doing.
Filters and Mood Based Search
Users can filter experiences by budget, time, effort, mood, social setting, and experience type. They can also search based on what they are in the mood for, which helps the product feel more personal and realistic.
Experience Detail Pages
Experience detail pages include what the experience is, why it fits, estimated cost, estimated time, location, effort level, best time to go, what to bring, and clear next steps. This is the main bridge between inspiration and action.
Commitment Flow
The commitment flow turns a possible experience into a real intention. Instead of simply saving an idea, the user decides to do it and sees what it will take to make it happen.
Receipts of Life
Receipts of Life are lightweight post experience reflections. They let users capture a short video or photo, write a one line reflection, and rate how alive, meaningful, or growth oriented the experience felt.
Private Archive
The archive shows completed experiences, media, reflections, patterns, stats, and emotional data over time. It turns individual moments into a visible record of a more intentional life.
Life Wrapped
Life Wrapped gives users recap insights across their experiences, including top moments, new things tried, places explored, awe moments, comfort zone expansion, chapter progress, and reflection patterns.
Challenge Modes
The product explored different intensity levels for experiences: Steady, Bold, and Wild. This idea later became part of the physical exhibition through the mystery experience card exercise, where visitors could pick a Wild, Bold, or Chill card and take an experience with them.
Results
The final result was both a digital product concept and a physical thesis exhibition.
By the end of the project, Lived had evolved from a broad concept about meaningful experiences into a tested product system with a full Discover → Commit → Do → Reflect loop.
Final outputs included:
High-fidelity mobile prototype
Onboarding flow
Explore and recommendation flow
Experience detail pages
Commitment flow
Receipt of Life capture
Archive and Life Wrapped screens
Concept website
Presentation deck
Research synthesis
Testing documentation
Full grad show exhibition system
The project included three testing phases: an early concept test, four guided reflection interviews, and five high-fidelity prototype tests. Across those rounds, I tested concept clarity, problem relevance, recommendation quality, actionability, emotional value, and whether the product felt meaningfully different from existing discovery tools.
The clearest result was that Lived became stronger when it moved from inspiration into follow through. Testing led directly to stronger planning support, better filters, clearer commitment, more grounded language, and a more useful archive.
Key Iterations
Testing did not just confirm the concept. It changed the product.
The biggest shift was that Lived became less of an inspiration tool and more of a system for choosing, planning, doing, and remembering meaningful experiences.
1. From Inspiration to Planning Support
Issue found in testing: Users liked the experience ideas, but after choosing one, they still did not know exactly what to do next.
Design response: I added a deeper planning layer to each experience page, including cost, time required, location, what to bring, effort level, best time to go, and clear next steps.
Why it mattered: This moved Lived from “that sounds cool” toward “I can actually do this.” It became the most important improvement in the final prototype.
2. From Broad Discovery to Better Controls
Issue found in testing: Recommendations could feel too broad because different users had different budgets, moods, schedules, comfort levels, and definitions of what sounded meaningful.
Design response: I added filters for budget, time, effort, mood, social setting, and experience type, plus a mood based search input where users could describe what they were looking for.
Why it mattered: This made discovery feel more realistic and personal. It also helped avoid the problem of treating all users as if they wanted the same kind of life.
3. From Saving Ideas to Committing
Issue found in testing: Choosing an experience risked feeling too close to saving something for later. That did not fully solve the follow through problem.
Design response: I made commitment a clearer product moment. The user is not just liking an idea. They are deciding to do it and seeing what it will take to make it real.
Why it mattered: The real design problem was the drop-off between intention and action.
4. From Storage to Life Archive
Issue found in testing: The archive had emotional potential, but it needed to feel more valuable than a folder of completed activities.
Design response: I expanded the archive to include completed experiences, reflection data, patterns, stats, experience categories, Life Wrapped insights, and visual memory cards.
Why it mattered: This made the archive feel like proof of a life being built over time. It turned isolated moments into visible momentum.
5. From Abstract Language to Clearer Framing
Issue found in testing: Some language around “meaningful experiences” and “experience rich life” could feel broad if the product did not define it through action.
Design response: I leaned into clearer phrases like “Turn intention into real experience,” “Build a life worth remembering,” and “The real problem is not desire. It is follow through.”
Why it mattered: The tone became emotional without becoming vague. It helped the product feel more direct, grounded, and usable.
Impact
Lived’s impact is not measured like a launched product, since this was a capstone concept. But the project created impact in four clear ways: user validation, product development, exhibition response, and future product opportunity.
User validation: Across testing, people consistently recognized the problem. They understood the gap between wanting more from life and actually doing something about it. Participants did not just say the idea was interesting. They described how it could help them choose, prioritize, plan, and follow through in their own lives.
Product development: The product evolved significantly through research and testing. It started as a concept about meaningful experiences and became a more complete system for intentional living. The most important change was the planning layer after experience selection, which turned the prototype from an inspiring concept into something more actionable.
Public exhibition: The grad show proved that the concept could connect with people quickly in a public setting. Visitors engaged with the sticky note wall, tried the prototype, picked challenge cards, scanned the website, and asked questions about how the product worked. The strongest response came from the interactive parts of the exhibit, because they let people reflect on their own lives instead of only reading about the product.
Product opportunity: Lived has potential beyond a school prototype because it addresses a real behavioral gap. The long term opportunity is not just helping people find things to do. It is building a system that helps people live more intentionally through discovery, planning, memory, reflection, and real world action.
Future Direction
If Lived continued beyond the capstone, I would build it as a mission driven nonprofit focused on improving quality of life through intentional experiences. The goal would not be to maximize screen time, push endless content, or turn people’s lives into another performance space. The goal would be to help people spend more of their limited time on experiences that create memory, confidence, connection, growth, and a stronger sense of being alive.
The first version would focus on Los Angeles. An LA first pilot makes sense because the city has the right mix of culture, nature, events, neighborhoods, nightlife, creative communities, and day trip opportunities. It also has a real planning problem: distance, traffic, cost, parking, social coordination, and decision fatigue can make even good ideas hard to follow through on.
Phase 1: LA prototype build, 2 to 3 months, roughly $15K to $35K
The first phase would focus on turning the current prototype into a stronger LA specific MVP. A small team could include a product designer, one developer, a content/experience curator, and part time support for research or operations. The goal would be to build a working version with onboarding, LA based recommendations, filters, planning details, commitment, and a simple archive.
Phase 2: Small LA pilot, 3 to 4 months, roughly $25K to $75K
The next step would be a small public pilot with curated LA experiences. This could start with a limited group of users and a focused set of experiences across categories like nature, culture, food, classes, social events, solo adventures, creative workshops, and local day trips. The goal would be to test whether users actually complete experiences after committing to them.
Phase 3: Partnerships and nonprofit growth, 6 to 12 months, roughly $100K to $250K
If the pilot worked, Lived could grow through partnerships with local experience providers, event platforms, cultural institutions, parks and recreation groups, schools, wellness organizations, and community nonprofits. Partnerships could help reduce cost, improve access, and make the product more useful for people who want to live more intentionally but need help finding realistic options.
Phase 4: Expansion beyond LA
After proving the model in Los Angeles, Lived could expand city by city. Each city would need local curation, local partnerships, and experience recommendations that actually fit the place. The long term vision is a nonprofit platform that helps people build lives with more memory, action, and meaning, starting locally and growing outward.
The most important next step would be measuring real follow through. The key question is not whether users like the idea. Testing already showed that they do. The real question is whether Lived can help people actually do more of the experiences they say matter to them.
What I Learned
This project taught me that a strong product concept needs both emotional truth and practical usefulness.
The emotional truth behind Lived is that many people do want to live more fully. They do think about the things they have not done, the routines they fall into, and the life they imagine for themselves. But emotional truth is not enough. A product has to help at the moment where behavior breaks.
For Lived, that moment was after selection. Users could be inspired by an experience, but still need help with cost, time, transportation, preparation, social context, and the first step. That was the most important design lesson from the project.
I also learned that reflection is powerful when it is simple. People liked the archive and Life Wrapped, but that does not mean they want to write long journal entries after every experience. The reflection flow has to be lightweight enough to sustain.
Another major lesson was that personalization has to be believable. If recommendations feel generic, users lose trust fast. For a product like Lived, relevance is everything.
The exhibition also taught me that physical interaction can make a digital concept easier to understand. The sticky note wall and card exercise helped people enter the project emotionally before they ever touched the prototype.
That changed how I think about product storytelling. Sometimes the best way to explain an app is not another screen. It is a simple prompt that makes the user feel the problem for themselves.
Reflection
Lived is one of the most personal projects I have made, but it also became one of the most research driven.
It started from my own experience of seeing how much my life changed when I tried new things, moved to new places, and followed unfamiliar opportunities. But the project became stronger when I tested that idea against research, real users, competitor patterns, and public exhibition feedback.
What I am most proud of is that Lived did not stay at the level of a vague motivational message. Through testing, it became a more specific product system built around discovery, commitment, planning, reflection, and memory.
The strongest part of the final concept is the full loop. Lived helps users find something meaningful, make it real, do it, capture it, and see those moments build over time. That loop is what makes the product different from a recommendations app, journal, planner, or bucket list.
The biggest shift in the project was realizing that inspiration is not enough. Follow-through is the real product problem. Lived became stronger when I stopped designing for activity discovery and started designing for the moment where people usually drop off.
People do not just need more ideas. They need help turning the life they keep imagining into the life they are actually living.
That is what this project was built to do.
