Mobile App · 2024
Julia (my best friend since U9 softball) and I dreampt up Tag in October of 2023, born out of our love for We’re Not Really Strangers and our hatred for being 2,935 miles apart for college. Ideally, we wanted to stay up to date with every detail of each other’s lives, but had ended up with poorly timed phone calls and attempts to send photo updates whenever we remembered. We both missed the effortless regularity with which we used to be able to share random parts of ourselves and our lives with each other, and felt like staying in touch should feel less like a burden, especially given that we just wanted to feel like we had a little taste of each other’s thoughts.
What if we built a fun, engaging, and easy way to stay connected with and even deepen your relationship with friends no matter where you are?
Tag is a mobile app that aims to facilitate meaningful conversations through thoughtfully crafted prompts. By creating small habitual points of connection with friends and family, Tag acts nudges users to nuture relationships with those closest to them, whether they’re in close proximity to one another or not.
After refining the concept for Tag and creating intial mockups for the user experience and interface, we decided to build out Tag for Stanford TreeHacks, Stanford’s 36-hour hackathon, where I had the exhilarating experience of finalizing mockups and designs for the app while we worked with a team of five (female!) engineers to create a working MVP for Tag as shown in the below video!
After building out the initial MVP and getting great feedback on the concpet, I went back to the desing drawing board to refine the UI and optimize for user customizability. When designing Tag, I wanted the app to feel distinctly un-app like, I wanted it to instead permeate more as a handwritten letter than as a typical social platform. On Tag, users begin by creating their own personal font, which is derived from their handwriting, a one-of-one signature that gives each of their posts a personal touch.