When you’re building something new, you need to keep coming back to what users/consumers will value. That means testing ideas, talking to people and ultimately adjusting how things are approached. When building Croncile, we have been doing that, including running questionnaires and hearing directly about how individuals and families are seeking to preserve their stories.
What we keep hearing
Most people we talk to rely on fragmented systems, like phone camera rolls, cloud backups, and sometimes older photo albums. Recurring ‘pain points’ are:
Too many digital photos/videos which are hard to organise
Difficult to find important moments later
Fear of losing important memories
Missing out on contributions from family members, and not enough focus on sharing memories
Lack of time to reflect on memories
In other words, thousands of photos, scattered across devices and platforms, become hard to organise and even harder to revisit in meaningful ways. We can think of the real challenge therefore being curation, reflection, and safe preservation.
What people want instead
Across the conversations and surveys, four motivations keep standing out:
Bringing together physical and digital memories in one place
Collaborating with family members on stories
Creating outputs like memoirs or family histories from collections
Building a lasting record of family history
They want storytelling tools and ways to collaborate across generations.
Why it matters
Happily, that is exactly the problem that Cronicle is being designed to tackle. If this sounds interesting, we’d love to hear from you. Or share with someone who you think would be interested.
Join the waitlist to learn more as we develop Cronicle, and take our short (5 minute) questionnaire to provide valuable input to help us build Cronicle into something that is worthy of your memories.