Design prototype

Poems were stuck in the chat.

Paper Trail puts them back on paper. You can wander, move a note, filter by mood, and send someone the exact poem. No account. No feed.

The problem

A poem that only exists inside a thread is hard to find, easy to crop, and impossible to share cleanly.

Yesterday, 1:14

the garden still waits, for footsteps that stopped coming...

years ago. i water what no longer believes in rain. every new leaf, feels less like ho

Last lines cut off. Line breaks gone. No title. No way back.

Shares that were screenshots: 31 of 40
Screenshots that cut a line: 22 of 31
Shares with a lasting link: 2 of 40

Who it touches

Three people, one broken handoff. Pick one.

Shreeraj

The poem exists. The place it lives does not.

Drafts sit in notes, chats, and voice memos. A friend asks for the garden one, and the search is a month of messages. Mood is a feeling in the writer's head, not a filter.

What I looked at

Sample readings for this prototype, not a published study. Eighteen conversations, forty shares, and three layouts timed on the same task.

MethodSampleQuestion

Conversations18Where does a poem go after it is written?

Share review40How much of the poem survives the send?

Timed layouts3 x 12Chat, grid, or wall: which one finds the feeling?

of 40 shares

Chat thread22

Camera roll11

Notes app5

A page you can return to2

Forty shares, counted by hand from sample threads.

Possible solutions

Six ways to fix the handoff. Two shipped. Four were set aside on purpose.

A wall you can pan

The poems already lived like paper, pinned and a little crooked. A wall keeps that. A feed would file them.

Tradeoff. Harder to build than a list. Drag and click have to stay apart.

Shipped and scrapped

Filter the list. The scrap pile is part of the design, not a leftover.

DecisionCallWhy this, not the other

What changed

Sample readings from the prototype. They show the measures, not a finished study.

Before

48sec

On the wall

9sec

Before48

Wall9

Name a feeling, then open the poem.

On the wall now

31 poems. These counts are the real set, not a sample. Anger and Unsorted stay empty until a poem belongs there.