Interaction - Bachelor
Memory Exchange is a mobile app designed for exchange and international students, solo travellers and anyone who loves connecting with others. It aims to keep connections long-lasting when living or travelling across different countries. With a playful, scrapbook-inspired look, users can collect shared memories and send digital postcards to the friends they’ve made along the way, turning short-lived moments into friendships that last.
Travelling and studying abroad is an amazing experience that brings people from all over the world together. You might make a new friend in your hostel, turn strangers into close friends at a festival, or meet someone in class who shows you around their city. But when everyone returns home, those connections are hard to hold onto. Group chats go quiet, photos sit forgotten in camera rolls, and different time zones make keeping in touch feel like effort.
Existing social media is built for doom-scrolling, not for nurturing a small number of meaningful friendships. There are few spaces designed to celebrate the specific people and moments that made a trip special.
Memory Exchange offers a slower, more personal alternative to social media. Instead of posting to a feed, users turn shared moments into scrapbook-style memories and send them as personalised digital postcards that arrive in a friend’s in-app mailbox. The app is Inspired by vintage postcards, handwritten letters and scrapbooking which makes staying in touch feel thoughtful, nostalgic and fun.
The idea for Memory Exchange began with my own time on exchange. Back home, I’d often scroll through my camera roll and send photos to the friends I’d made overseas. I still felt connected to them, but different time zones and busy schedules made it hard to keep in touch. Sometimes you just want to send something they can open to let them know you’re thinking of them.
I wanted the app to feel nostalgic, like a scrapbook or a postcard from a friend. After all, who doesn’t love scrapbooking and postcards? I started with a moodboard exploring vintage postcards, washi tape, pressed flowers and handwritten notes, then designed my own logo and stickers in Adobe Illustrator. This gave the app a more sophisticated look than typical social media, while still letting people show their creativity through their memories.
From there, I built a mid-fi prototype in Figma to test layouts and core interactions. Early versions included a map-based Journey section, but I removed it to focus on what mattered most: creating memories and sending postcards. Following feedback, I added a mailbox so that receiving post would feel like a moment to look forward to. I then developed the hi-fi prototype into a working web app and tested it with users, who loved the stickers and postcard style and found opening the mailbox especially exciting.
Mia is an interaction designer passionate about creating experiences that work for a wide range of people. She believes thoughtful aesthetics can make technology more fun, approachable and easy to use. Blending research, empathy and playful experimentation, Mia designs interfaces that feel personal, intuitive and memorable.
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