We enjoy hearing and sharing stories here at Kisko. Our experiences define us and sharing our memories is as rewarding as learning from others through their stories. What we want to explore with Taleway, however, are the locations of those experiences.

Our team for Kisko Publishing Hackathon didn’t include any developers, so we decided to focus on a viable concept that we would like to see come true.

The idea of Taleway is to provide a simple way for people to share stories tied to locations. They can share their memories from their favorite coffee shop or tell an imaginative story sparked by a seaside scenery. Taleway locates the person using the application with their phone’s GPS and uses that data to gather the stories around them as well as tie stories they write to their location.

The users can also see the locations of the stories with the application’s map so that they can explore their surroundings for new content.

Use-case

A use-case can be a person sitting in a cafeteria, opening the Taleway app. They see a list of story titles and open a short story of a person telling how they had their first date with their current husband in that same cafeteria. The person smiles and remembers a special moment they’ve had there as well and they write it down in the application. Now other people, who visit the cafeteria, can see the person’s story when visiting the location.

After sending their story, the person opens the application’s map and notices stories in the nearby park they haven’t visited before. They decide to go and see what kind of experiences the park has to offer. Exploring new places for creating new experiences is one of the main focuses of Taleway.

In case the user is in a hurry (or freezing their hands while trying to tell a tale of the coldest blizzard of the century), they can choose for the application to remember the location and write their story later on elsewhere. This allows people to write longer stories for others to enjoy.

Design decisions

There was some debate on what the content format should be. Should the app have video? Pictures? Hashtags? While a picture can tell more than a thousand words, we wanted the scenery of the user’s location to play the visual part and focus on text only content in the app. We also hope for this to encourage people to write more in general and we feel people already have enough ways of expressing themselves with pictures.

To give even more emphasis on text, the visual design was chosen to be black and white to simulate the look of text on paper. In addition, the reading and writing experiences are designed to be distraction free, with the text content opening to full screen, hiding other UI elements.

We feel sharing is a fulfilling act in itself. This is why the only feedback provided to the storywriter is the number of people that have read their story. We also know sometimes we can find it embarrassing to show our poems and love stories to the public, so to let people share their stories without pressure, they have the freedom to post their stories totally anonymously.

What next?

The next step for Taleway would be making a prototype that could be used for user testing and gauging interest. We have done our best to weave out the typical concerns pointed towards privacy issues in location based applications in Taleway with anonymity and the lack of straight user to user interaction. Therefore we would really like to see whether it could make an impact with its own twist on publishing.

Here is a site Henri built to introduce what Taleway is in a nutshell.