SparkBook - Spark Your Creativity
A digital notebook that lets artists store multimedia sources of inspiration and smartly organizes them into the categories they choose.
My role: App Developer & Product Lead. I wore a lot of hats, building the app while driving many of the product decisions.
Team: Claire Birge, Elijah Anderson, Luiza Ribeiro, Mikela Coseteng
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The Problem
Artists struggle to quickly store their many sources of inspiration in one centralized, organized place, which makes it harder to come back to them when they sit down to create.
The Solution
A mobile app where artists capture photos, notes, audio, files, and music into "Sparklettes," share inspiration with a community, and organize their boards with AI-assisted layouts while staying in control.
Skills Demonstrated
Product Management
Drove key product decisions, translating research findings and test results into feature priorities and design changes.
Needfinding & User Research
Interviewed five artists across media and experience levels, then synthesized findings with empathy maps, POVs, and 30+ How Might We statements.
Experience Prototyping
Designed three experiments to test our core assumptions before building anything high-fidelity.
Usability Testing & Iteration
Ran think-aloud tests on low- and medium-fidelity prototypes and addressed 96 heuristic evaluation violations, prioritizing severity 3-4 issues.
Mobile App Development
Built a working React Native app with real authentication, persistent data, and a Spotify integration that testers could run on their own phones.
About the Project
SparkBook came out of a studio on intelligent creative tools: building AI that acts as a collaborator rather than a replacement. In our interviews, artists said again and again that art should be fundamentally human, but they were open to AI handling the mundane parts, like organization.
The artists we spoke with found inspiration everywhere (music, walks, places, people) but scattered it across camera rolls, notes apps, and Pinterest boards, and often couldn't find an idea when they needed it. SparkBook gives them one flexible place to capture it all, with AI that suggests organization but never takes over creative decisions.
On a team of four, I wore a lot of hats. As an app developer I helped build the React Native app end to end, and I also drove many of the product decisions, from which features to prioritize to how we responded to usability findings between prototype rounds.
Key Features
- Quick Add for photos, notes, voice memos, files, and music
- Sparklette boards for organizing inspiration by project
- Community feed to share and save others' sparks, with attribution
- Organize tool with Grid, Group by Type, and Smart Spacing layouts
- Undo/redo and lightweight "undo" toasts instead of heavy confirmation modals
Technical Highlights
- React Native + Expo Go for fast iteration and cross-platform testing
- Supabase authentication and database for real accounts
- Spotify API search-and-attach flow for adding songs
- Expo Router stack navigation
Design Process
Needfinding
We interviewed five artists, from a 20-year-old film student to a VR and animation artist with 25 years of experience, in Palo Alto, San Francisco, and over Zoom. Three themes came out of the interviews: artists find inspiration across many media, they struggle to organize it, and they see art as a way to build human connection.
Experience Prototypes
We tested the assumptions behind our top three solutions:
- Collaborative creation: after a group discussion about inspiring music, participants felt freer and more creative. The assumption was half proven, since everyone preferred different music.
- Documenting inspiration: an artist relied heavily on references but spent a long time digging through untagged photos for a starting image.
- Card sorting: sorting by medium helped, but participants found images fastest using their own categories, so we gave users control over how their boards are organized.
| Card sort round | Avg. time to find an image |
|---|---|
| Random | 3.83s |
| Custom categories | 1.63s |
| By medium | 2.30s |
Iteration
We compared smartwatch, AR, and mobile concepts and chose mobile because accessibility mattered more to our users than immersion. Paper prototype testing showed that users couldn't find the organize button and expected to share from the Community tab. We fixed both in our Figma medium-fi prototype, then used a heuristic evaluation to tighten consistency ("Add" vs. "Next" vs. "Save"), add undo and delete, and make editable fields clear.
Wizard of Oz & Hard-Coded Behaviors
To test how artists want to interact with "smart" tools before building an ML backend, we built the full UX for AI organize and Quick Add suggestions, backed by rule-based layouts and scripted suggestions. We also seeded the community feed and demo accounts so testers always saw rich content.
Values in Design
Three values guided every decision: flexibility (any medium, any organization), community (sharing with proper attribution), and spontaneity (capturing ideas the moment they strike). We hand-drew most of the app's icons to signal that SparkBook is a space for human artists.
Next Steps
We'd like to build out the AI organize tool so artists can type exactly how they want their inspiration organized, and explore translating media between forms, like turning a song into text.