Phocal
Overview
Phocal is a visual reminder app for iOS. It was designed as a simple way to remember the things you'd like to remember, from the restaurant you walk by on the street, to that amazing bottle of wine you had at your friends dinner party. Using visuals, coupled with location and time based reminders, Phocal is the simplest and most effective reminder tool.
Responsibilities
Product strategy User research Product design Development
Company
Freelance
Year
2021
Process
The origin story
The idea for Phocal came from a long time frustration with the tools available to keep track of things I wanted to come back to at a later date. Photos would get lost in the hundreds or thousands of photos we take and notes provide less context and get messy and unorganized fast.
As a result of this frustration, I wanted to create a tool that was purely visual, and allowed me to view at a glance, all of the interesting things that I wanted to remember.
Features
Phocal is a minimal app, designed in a way that allows you to see what you want, when you want, nothing more and nothing less. Because of this, features are intentionally slim.
Feed: Your feed is your entire list of items you've added, completely searchable.
Collections: Collections help you to organize your items. So whether you'd like to create a collection for the restaurants you'd like to visit, or all of your friends birthdays with pictures of your friends.
Location Tagging: Geo-tagging your items is super helpful for remembering where that awesome record shop was.
Reminders: Optional time and location based reminders make sure that you definitely won't forget to grab that incredible bottle of wine next time you're at the store.
Design Process
While designing Phocal, it was important to keep the focus solely on the viewing and adding process, as this was not meant to be a time killer app where users would spend hours upon hours. It was also not a social app. It was a personal database of items the user has specifically curated. The user needed to browse existing items, and add new items, and thats all. This is why the design is incredibly minimal, with the bottom tab bar only containing 3 items, 2 of which are display variations (Feed & Collections), separated by the action to add a new item.
As phone's are larger, it was also important for me to design an experience where the user could do mostly everything with simply their thumb, and with very little reach. Key interactions like viewing the details of an item or adding a new item are viewed as popovers, allowing the user to simply swipe down with their thumb to dismiss, and continue browsing their feed exactly where they left off.
