I carried out a few in person interviews with people who come from all different backgrounds. I used Dovetail to capture all the interviews.
The transcripts can be found here:
Dovetail – Customer Intelligence Platform
I wanted to try and find a wide range of ages for my project so I can reflect how different generations feel about collecting memories physically and emotionally. I didn’t want to interview anyone under 25 for my project as I feel nostalgia is something we feel later in life.
Participant 1:
25 Year Old- The Nostalgic Video Gamer
What I Learned
-
Physicality Barrier:
- The participant highly values the tactile and physical nature of objects. They believe physical objects preserve memories in a real world space that apps can’t replicate.
- Digital versions of video games are often seen as different experiences because they lack the original graphics, hardware, and feeling of nostalgia.
-
Preservation Anxiety:
- There is a fear of physical decay with items such as CDs and hardware breaking. Digital loss such as backups corrupting or data being lost.
- User feels a sense of uneasiness with current digital preservations methods for example, having to buy a gift card to use on a old digital store like a PS Vita or Nintendo digital shop.
- Loneliness of Personal Apps:
- Using an app to store memories can be isolating, the user said a personal storage app could feel lonely and isolating. Memories are most powerful when shared, the user suggested engagement is driven by seeing others perspectives or knowing someone else shares the same interests or passions.
How can this help my project?
- Shift from isolated to community
I don’t want it to feel like a private gallery that people only open once in a while. I want it to feel connected so it doesn’t feel lonely, giving the users a real reason to come back.
- Shared Interest threads: Let people tag objects or memories so they can discover others who’ve saved similar items, like how Reddit threads form around a shared topic.