Capsule - First Place Overall @ Rice Designathon 2025
Redesigning Digital Journaling in the age of AI
Role
Product Designer
Interaction Designer
Duration
February 2025
Skills
UI/UX
User Research
Designathon
Collaboration
Project Overview
For Rice Designathon 2025, I teamed up with 3 other college students from UCLA and UPenn to create a mobile app that addresses the prompt "How do we stay human in the age of AI?". We carried out research, interviews, designs, and user testing in an iterative process within 36 hours. We then presented as one of 8 finalist groups, and was able to get First Place Overall out of 110 competing teams!
TL;DR: What is Capsule?
To be human is to experience life as it unfolds—to hear, see, and think in the moment. Most people don’t journal—not because they don’t want to, but because it feels like work. Instead of treating journaling as structured writing, Capsule reimagines journaling as an effortless act of gathering, collecting, and curating moments – a modern hunter-gatherer approach to self-reflection. Users can capture thoughts through photos, voice notes, or short texts without the pressure to immediately organize or articulate everything, eliminating the friction that often prevents them from getting started. Over time, AI gently surfaces patterns and themes via fun, shareable cards, turning journaling into a dynamic experience.
This process transforms journaling from a task into an engaging, effortless activity—more like scrapbooking to collect pieces of experience. Capsule allows users to compile life’s snippets into lasting time capsules, helping you stay connected to yourself and the world around you.
Team Members & Roles
Bao To (Columbia)
UI/UX Design
Sahithi Lingampalli (UCLA)
UI & Visual Design
Mandy Lai (UCLA)
UX Design & Research
Mary Liu (UPenn)
Graphic Design
Despite our roles, we were flexible and often switch responsibilities and collaborate with each other throughout the hackathon event.
Defining our direction
Why journaling?
In a hyper-digital world, we identified that the act of journaling is the heartbeat of genuine self-expression. It’s not just about capturing memories - it’s about celebrating the raw, spontaneous beauty of every lived moment. Therefore, from the start, we focused our design ethos and direction towards leveraging the fine line between embracing the technologies and rejecting the addictive usage patterns of mobile apps, while also making sure to center our research and design around the specific human need for authenticity and mindful reflection.
Research
Survey
We collected insights from 35 respondents to learn about their journaling habits and the challenges they face.
Insight
Many respondents noted that a major advantage of digital journals is their ability to combine photos, audio, and text in one place. One response to the prompt What’s a feature missing from conventional journals? stated, “To visualize both text and visual elements in an easily navigable manner.”
From the survey (link), we found that the overwhelming majority of respondents viewed journaling as “too much work” and described themselves as “too lazy” to journal consistently. Most saw it as requiring significant active effort—whether curating materials like photos, tickets, and receipts for physical scrapbooks or putting in mental effort to write. Another key insight was that users value multimedia entries.
For those who do not currently journal, it is not a priority in their daily lives. However, most expressed interest in journaling if it were easier and acknowledged its value for self-reflection and memory-keeping. In short, most people want to journal—but the process feels too effortful.
Interviews
Building on these findings, we conducted five in-person interviews using pre-written scripts (link) and asked follow-up questions based on participants’ responses. These interviews provided deeper insights into user behaviors and preferences for a reimagined journaling app. We discovered several elements that are crucial for user satisfaction:
Ease of Use
A major recurring theme was the need for ease of use. One interviewee noted, “It'd be nice to have a transcription feature; talking is faster than typing, which is faster than writing.” The app should minimize friction, allowing users to effortlessly capture thoughts and moments.
Engaging & Fun
Many expressed interest in aesthetically pleasing layouts and interactive features such as stickers to enhance the experience.
Organization & Navigation
Additionally, users emphasized the importance of being able to retrieve past entries easily, highlighting the need for a strong search function to help them revisit memories without hassle.
Consolidating our research, we have defined a central product vision for our app: Capsule is a multimedia journaling experience designed to minimize user friction, allowing users to effortlessly capture thoughts through photos, voice notes, or short texts. Capsule will feature intuitive search and interactive elements to enhance usability and engagement.
User Personas & Scenarios
Capsule is designed to resonate with a wide spectrum of users by capturing the essence of daily life in a fluid, multimedia format. To ensure our design is both intuitive and universally appealing, we developed personas that represent key user archetypes—each with unique needs and motivations.
Alex, the Creative Storyteller
Profile: Late 20s, artist and blogger.
Needs: Quick, intuitive capture of spontaneous creative moments.
Capsule Benefit: One-tap multimedia entries and playful AI recaps that transform fleeting ideas into vibrant narratives.
Jordan, the Mindful Professional
Profile: Mid-30s, busy professional.
Needs: A fast, streamlined way to record reflections during brief breaks.
Capsule Benefit: Effortless one-tap entries and intuitive search, enabling quick self-reflection without distraction.
Taylor, the Digital Nomad
Profile: Early 30s, frequent traveler.
Needs: An efficient tool for capturing diverse travel experiences on the go.
Capsule Benefit: Seamless multimedia capture and unified travel diaries that compile moments into a coherent narrative.
Casey, the Reflective Family Archivist
Profile: Late 40s, family-oriented.
Needs: A simple, organized way to preserve and relive cherished family memories.
Capsule Benefit: Effortless recording and dynamic recaps that create a cohesive, multimedia family archive.
Sam, the Social Student
Profile: Early 20s college student who values authenticity and spontaneous expression.
Needs: A platform to capture raw moments in diverse formats (photos, voice notes, texts) and share them effortlessly with friends.
Capsule Benefit: Delivers one-tap multimedia entries and engaging recaps, offering a richer, more genuine experience than apps like BeReal.
Riley, the Tech Enthusiast
Profile: Mid-20s, early adopter.
Needs: An innovative, aesthetically pleasing app that blends cutting-edge tech with usability.
Capsule Benefit: Intuitive design, seamless AI integration, and visually engaging recaps that satisfy both form and function.
Design Challenge
How might we create an intuitive solution that makes journaling a voluntary, enjoyable, and easy task, while also promoting authenticity and self-reflection?
Another consideration: If we are to leverage the latest AI technologies, how would we design a user flow and app structure that allows for responsible use of AI that does not invade the personal voice of the users?
Diving Deeper
Competitive Analysis
To quickly assess Capsule’s market positioning, we conducted a comparative analysis against leading competitors—BeReal, Day One, and Journey. This evaluation focuses on key dimensions such as capture methods, multimedia integration, AI-driven content curation, user experience, social sharing capabilities, search functionality, and design aesthetics.
Analysis Takeaways
This analysis reveals that Capsule is positioning itself as a unique blend of effortless entry creation and engaging, AI-driven insights. It has the potential to capture users who find traditional journaling too cumbersome (addressing a gap left by Day One) and those who want more depth than BeReal offers. The success of its AI features in delivering genuinely useful and motivating insights will be crucial to its differentiation in the market.
The Solution
Capsule is a multimedia journaling app that effortlessly transforms your everyday moments into dynamic, shareable narratives through one-tap capture and playful AI-driven recaps.
Key features:
One-tap entries: We’ve made jotting down thoughts, recording audio, and taking photos possible in one swift action. Our research indicates that people perceive journal entries to be time-consuming and requiring high effort. As such, we’ve attempted to design Capsule’s UX to have as little friction as possible – allowing users to get started with one tap buttons immediately from the landing page.
Gentle AI: AI works subtly in the background, surfacing insights as nudges rather than structured intel. AI-powered journaling tools often feel too clinical, invasive, or analytical. Instead of stats and dashboards, our use of AI provides fun, wrapped-style recaps with silly notes, inspired by apps like Spotify Wrapped and Apple Memories.
Capsule recaps: Fun, shareable recaps with insights into your journaling. A common problem participants in our user survey mentioned was that they had a lack of motivation to journal and stated there was little reward with journaling. To alleviate these problems, we decided to incorporate a wrapped-style summary of users’ entries with cute graphics and type that would motivate users in adding more entries to receive more insights.
Orange, geometric characters: Capsule features little playful, personality-filled characters in confirmations and recaps. A common problem participants in our user survey mentioned was that they had a lack of motivation to journal and stated there was little reward with journaling. To alleviate these problems, we decided to incorporate playful, diverse characters into our design to add extra joy and motivation with capturing entries.
Lo-fi Designs
User Flows
We started off with designing the user flows in Miro. This is then refined and modified as we move through the next steps in the process, ensuring that we stick to our predefined goals and address the users needs and pain points effectively.
Wireflows & Structure
With a more structured idea of how the app should work, we then start drawing out the basic frames and layout of how the navigation works and how the app interface should look. We did both the static wireframes and the interaction flows at the same times due to designathon time restrictions.
Working on this as a whole group allowed us to clear out any confusions and make sure everyone is at the same place.
Example: Onboarding Wireflow
Branding & Visuals
At the same time, we split responsibilities, and some of us also simultaneously work on the graphics and how the app should look. Our idea stems from the name "Capsule" - which connotes the time capsules, but also the pills. We want the users to play the "curator" role, combining all the collected media together into one solidified, easily transmissible storage.
Moodboards & Idea Formation
Hi-fi Designs
Collaborative Design
Our structured approach paid off as we move on to creating all the hi-fidelity mock-ups and prototypes for the app. We separate our duties to work on each core feature simultaneously, while leveraging the strengths of each person in the team to work together, give feedbacks, leave comments, and iterate on each parts of the project.
We combined a mixture of asynchronous work, team meetings, and one-on-one design sessions within the fews hours we have left in the designathon to create a final project.
Prototyping
We are also able to do prototyping to ensure all the flows work correctly and the app navigation and structure is intuitive yet also innovative. With some time left, I also componentised the small elements like buttons and cards to make the prototype as close as possible to an actual implemented project and ensure a structured design project.
Demos & Recording
In the end, we finished the app two hours before the designathon deadline, and recorded a video to showcase our design philosophy, approach, and demos.
I used Jitter.video to create some smooth transitions and micro-interactions, which can be seen in the demo below!
Prototype in Figma - Click below to access!
Results
Judging
We were judged by Senior Designers and Product Designers at various companies like NYT, Indeed, Adobe, Dropbox, Atlassian, Expedia, and made it to the Finalist round, where we presented live in front of the judge and other participants online.
We were judged on several criteria:
Result
We fortunately received First Place Overall out of 110 competing teams!
Feedback
We asked for feedback from the judges after the designathon. Here are what they said:
Judge #1
This is a fantastic concept with excellent visual execution. The design strikes the perfect balance between simplicity and user exploration, making the experience feel intuitive yet engaging. The clean and well-structured interface allows users to navigate effortlessly while still encouraging curiosity and discovery. The thoughtful layout and interactions create a seamless flow, ensuring that users feel both guided and empowered as they engage with the experience.
That said, I would love to see the team explore ways to enhance idea generation by incorporating suggestions and prompts. Offering subtle guidance or intelligent recommendations could help users feel more inspired and supported in their journey. Whether through AI-driven insights, contextual prompts, or interactive cues, providing gentle nudges in the right direction could make the experience even more dynamic and engaging. By refining this aspect, the app could further encourage creativity and exploration while maintaining its simple yet immersive design.
Judge #2
Your project brilliantly reimagines journaling, making it effortless, engaging, and visually delightful with a seamless one-tap entry system and fun AI-generated recaps. The playful, personality-filled design makes the app feel motivating rather than like a chore, and the visual execution is exceptionally strong. A great opportunity to strengthen the theme could be connecting the app’s name, Capsule, to user features, such as allowing users to tag their entries with pill-shaped labels for better organization and discovery. The combination of fun recaps, interactive elements, and an inviting aesthetic makes Capsule stand out as a highly engaging and rewarding experience. Refining usability details and ensuring long-term engagement strategies will further enhance the impact of this thoughtfully designed app.
Judge #3
-Love that you conducted surveys and interviews. You boiled down your findings into clear insights and incorporated those into the final product
-The use of illustrations were fun and felt like a professional app.
-You made it easy to create a new entry in multiple ways, to match the mood or preferences of your users.
-There is slight learning curve over what is a capsule vs an individual entry. It is quick enough to figure out, but a little more introduction to the concept would make your app stronger.
We took notes of these feedback, and are keeping them in mind while iterating on the design and building the actual working app.
Takeaways
Deep User Empathy: We learned that understanding user behaviors and motivations is essential; even under tight deadlines, focusing on what people genuinely need leads to impactful design decisions.
Simplicity Wins: I discovered that streamlining interactions, like our one-tap entry, can drastically reduce friction and encourage habitual use.
Balanced AI Integration: We realized that when AI is integrated in a subtle, playful way, it can enhance the experience without overwhelming users.
Team Collaboration & Resilience: The designathon further reinforced my appreciation for the collaborative spirit and a willingness to adapt are as important as technical skills in achieving breakthrough results.
Reflection
For me, a key element in us winning this designathon was our ability to resolve conflicts and communicate. While we ran into some heated discussions due to team members having different view points and varying windows of availability (we were in two different time zones!), everyone was willing to meet and talk through our concerns, effectively resolving our disagreements and preserve our momentum, creating a finish product within a very tight deadline.
I am happy to have made new friends and learned much more through working with them through this event!
So… What's Next?
With the app fully designed, why waste this opportunity? I took initiative to program the project into a fully working app. I am using React Native so that it can be published on both IOS and Android devices!
Follow the coding journey:
https://github.com/tothienbao6a0/CapsuleReactNative
