Inspiration
We first wanted to look into the feelings of 2016 and the reason it feels the most nostalgic in the last decade. We wanted to combine the tracking and reminiscing of memories as well as the community and social aspect for visiting new places and meeting/interacting with other users.
What it does
Echoes is a location-based social app where users discover and leave mementos tied to real places. These can be photos, videos, or short mementos that capture what a place means to someone. Instead of endless scrolling, users explore their surroundings, uncover echoes nearby, and connect their own memories to them. The result is a living archive of emotion, discovery, and community built into everyday spaces.
How we built it
We designed Echoes as a mobile-first prototype with a strong focus on user experience, emotional storytelling, and place-based interaction. We mapped out the core journey from discovery to contribution, designed the interface and feature system, and built an interactive prototype centered on exploring echoes in physical space.
Challenges we ran into
We found it difficult to work with Framer as its a foreign tool to us but we were able to pick up the small intricacies and ultimately function with the design platform.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're very proud of the UI and the prototype as well as its features clearly displaying the key details and solutions to our main pain points.
What we learned
We learned that the strongest product ideas are not always the most complex, but the ones rooted in a real feeling people already recognize. In our case, that was the sense that the internet has become too polished, passive, and predictable. We also learned how hard it is to design social interaction without falling into the same patterns of likes, clout, and performance that define most platforms today.
What's next for Echoes
What’s next for Echoes is turning the concept into a real, usable platform. The first step would be building live location support, persistent accounts, and real fragment posting so users can actually leave and discover memories in physical spaces. From there, we would want to pilot it in a dense community like a university campus, where shared locations and nostalgia already exist naturally.
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