Kinship

In the summer of 2019 I joined a team to develop ideas around how to solve the problem of relationship decay. We observed that the best way to improve relationships, both personal and professional, was through regular contact. However, modern life creates enough noise and distance that folks felt like they were constantly failing in their friendships. We then interviewed people who were considered to be highly successful at maintaining relationships and observed that they each had their own unique systems for keeping up to date with their circle of friends. This was a clear indicator to us that there was a need not being met by the tools currently available.

Over the next year I worked with a small team to develop the Kinship app as a way to solve this need. At a basic level, this is a Evernote-style note taking app married to a CMS type datasystem. The main design pillars were:

  • People centric - The fundamental goal of the app is to strengthen and renew bonds with people in the user’s life, so every aspect leads back to connecting with people.

  • Omnivore - The app should accept any kind of information the user wants to drop into it. Rather than drive the user to fill out standard fields, we would let them dictate the kinds of data is important, and learn from it.

  • Get out of the way - The app never interrupts the user when they are adding information, utilizing a concept utilizing a concept we simply call ‘tend’. Everything is accepted and saved, so the user would experience a smooth and seamless interface while getting important details out of their head. Instead the app would prompt the user at a later time to resolve questions, assign notes to contacts, etc.

  • Personal - The whole business model is based on a subscription-only service app with all information securely encrypted.

The Kinship iOS app entered beta in April of 2020, and should be available in the appstore sometime in the summer.

Tools Used

Sketch and InVision for wireframing and building prototypes. Principle was used for creating animated transitions. And then Zeplin was used for sharing designs and specs with the dev team.