We live in a world where looking back at our precious memories is a cherished activity. We also want our experiences when reflecting on these moments to be celebrated and warm. The Memories feature within Personal Cloud is dedicated to allowing users to view, share, and celebrate all of the incredible moments they capture and store.

As the lead designer for Memories, I have put all of my energy into this feature. It is currently evoloving throughout 2024 to be our largest anchor feature of the year, incorportating a web-based solution into our native platform while existing as a standalone PWA feature as well. This has been a complex challege, since both designs need to match seamlessly so users do not feel they have actually left the native experience. Load times, menu items, and backend handoffs have all been problems, but I have worked with the POs and Developers to solve each one efficiently.

The desirability for this feature is high, and similar experiences can be found in many photo backup apps already. We set our sights on immersing users into the good old days every time they visit this feature, with key details like slideshow, autoplay next, and easily available actions like manage/share/download. This feature continues to show strong signs of improving engagement and retention of users, allowing our roadmap to promote it to the apps global navigation and further amplify its use.

Explore provides the gateway to interacting with a variety of users content. With the introduction of this feature, all users have a central hub for accessing search, people, places, tagged content, and more.

This feature was an anchor feature for Synchronoss in 2023, and required extensive refinement with key stakeholders internally and with our largest customer, Verizon. Before the introduction of Explore, metrics showed users were not engaging with a variety of content types. We learned that without proper tagging support there was little function for search, and as a result content was being missed. Working as the lead designer with input from our Senior Design Manager, we designed this feature to address all outlying problems.

As one of the largest features designed and implemented in the last 5 years at Synchronoss, we worked tirelessly to produce a cohesive native experience alongisde a PWA web version. Despite significant input from stakeholders, we were able to deploy this feature by the end of 2023 and meet our timeline with the final release of the year. This project required extreme time management and collaboration, and while it was deemed a huge success, next time it would be much smoother if communication happened earlier with our external stakeholders. Additionally, working with native and PWA teams in silos was a mistake, and current projects are proving to be more streamlined with joint conversations happening right from the start.

Working with large amounts of user content presents complex challenges, including the potential for bad actors and corruption. In the event of malware interference or a massive file corruption, BackTrack has you covered. Working with a talented team of desktop developers, we built and implemented this unique feature.

This feature accomplished the goal of allowing users affected by any issues within their repositories to "backtrack" a certain amount of time and recover lost or damaged files. Over the course of one PI, I worked with a team of desktop developers, and sought input from a variety of stakeholders with legal and technical expertise.

To create the best UX, I did competitive analysis on what existed in the marketplace currently. Through this, I learned what was necessary for success, including appropriate steps and reassuring tones to help users understand the highly technical process. This feature would ultimately become an anchor feature that we sold to our Tier 1 customers, and I became the lead designer for all desktop features due to the success of this project.