Emphasis Application
What research guided the design?
The design was guided by interviews with avid readers who regularly highlighted books and articles but rarely revisited those highlights. A key insight was that highlights were scattered across platforms like Kindle, Medium, Audible, and personal notebooks, making them hard to find and easy to forget. This helped define the need for one place to collect, organize, and revisit important ideas.
What were the design principles for this project?
The design was guided by minimal cognitive load, consistency, personalization, clear feedback, and intuitive navigation. Since the app was meant to support reflection and memory, the experience needed to feel simple, calm, and easy to return to, while still allowing users to organize highlights in a way that felt personal.
How did you prioritize the features?
I used the Kano model to separate expected features from delight features. Core features like adding highlights, filtering, and search were prioritized because they directly solved the main user problem. Features like highlight customization, sharing, and viewing surrounding context were treated as delight features that made the experience more useful and emotionally engaging.
Challenge
Readers often highlight important ideas across books, articles, and reading platforms, but rarely return to them because the highlights are scattered and lose context over time. There wasn't a simple way to revisit, and organize what they had read without manually collecting notes.
Solution
Emphasis is a mobile app that brings highlights from multiple reading platforms into one place and helps users organize them through tags, mood-based filters, and search. The app also lets users view the original context around a highlight, making it easier to reuse important ideas later.
Impact
As a graduate design project, Emphasis explored how digital reading tools can better support memory, reflection, and learning. The design focused on low cognitive load, personalization and intuitive navigation.
Configuring On-Demand Terminal Services