Stash: a temporary home for unfinished ideas

Personal project

Aug 2025, 2026

We all jot down ideas on-the-go—in Notes, Notion, Google Docs, sticky notes—only to watch them pile into a forgotten “idea graveyard.”

For this project, I focused heavily on user research and needs alignment for a common problem normalized out of habit. I designed a lightweight solution to idea storage and retrieval.

Lookout is a real-time outbreak response platform that was critical for visualizing genomic and clinical data during the 2025 mpox outbreak in Sierra Leone, as featured in Time magazine.


Originally built for desktop, on-the-ground public health teams requested a mobile version during the outbreak. I designed an adaptable solution tailored for low-resource settings that's intended to be deployed for the broader Lookout system for future outbreak monitoring.

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CONTEXT

Sole designer

5 weeks (summer 2025), 1 week (summer 2026)

TOOLS

Figma

SKILLS

User Research

Interaction Design

AI prototyping

RESEARCH

Competitor research

I took a deep dive into 12 products dedicated to quick note-taking and productivity, with 4 standouts:

Show details

Notion

Powerful, but overwhelming

Apple Notes

Convenient, but messy

Google Keep

Lightweight, but lacks hierarchy

Things 3

Clean interface, but limited accessibility

User interviews

I conducted 8 semi-structured interviews that captured a wide range of professions and organization styles. Some were meticulous planners, others were more on the disorganized side. Despite these differences, I uncovered recurring patterns and pain points:

Highly Personalized Workflows

"I have a structured way of organizing my ideas, but it's a little elaborate"

  • 7/8 users have a "good enough but not the best" way of handling ideas established by habit

  • 8/8 users maintain separate workflows for personal and work ideas

Fragmented Capture Systems

"I use Notion, Notes, a Google Doc — whichever is open at the time — and hope I remember"

  • 7/8 users record ideas across multiple tools (apps, docs, screenshots, physical planners)

  • 5/8 users say tool choice is based on what’s most convenient in the moment

Producing an Idea Graveyard

"I have so many notes that just the thought of organizing them stresses me out"

  • 6/8 users have a large, innavigable collection of ideas that they don't plan to organize

Easily-Forgotten Ideas

"How many ideas have I had that I've kind of just forgotten?"

  • 7/8 users have lost ideas because of scattered storage and poor recall systems

Identifying a common thread

While organization styles vary widely across individuals, they all follow the same general flow, which requires a lot of active recall, especially for ideas that need deeper development.

While organization styles vary widely across individuals, they all follow the same general flow, which requires a lot of active recall, especially for ideas that need deeper development.

Capture

Recall

Use

Discard

Transfer

Forget

Short-term ideas

Birthday gift

Long-term ideas

Thesis direction

The gap

While capture speed is extremely fast, the retrieval problem is universal — users either forgot where an idea was stored, or couldn’t resurface it at the right moment.

This gap between fast capture and effective retrieval defines the opportunity space: not just storing ideas, but ensuring they remain discoverable and alive.

The gap between fast capture and effective retrieval defines the opportunity space: not just storing ideas, but ensuring they remain actionable, discoverable, and alive.

Stash

Use

Discard

Transfer

Short-term ideas

Birthday gift

Long-term ideas

Thesis direction

CORE PRINCIPLES

Defining scope: What Stash is and isn't

I designed Stash as a lightweight, temporary home for ideas. It's built to make it easy to capture an idea now and keep the idea in your back pocket until you're ready to do something with it.

Stash & release

Quick-capture on mobile & desktop, then release ideas

Effortless organization

Lightweight tagging and continuous idea categorization

No more idea graveyard

Temporarily bury ideas, and retrieve them when ready

What Stash isn't:

  • An archive of 2,837 ideas (my Notes app)

  • Project planning, second brain, todo lists — there are other apps for that

THE SOLUTION

A simple, playful app

My first iteration lived in Figma last summer. This year, I used Claude Code to turn the concept into a working app.

I borrowed familiar patterns from consumer apps to make reviewing and releasing ideas feel quick and satisfying. Hand-drawn shapes and visual clutter make the collection feel intentionally imperfect, providing a subtle reminder that ideas aren't meant to sit here forever.

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© 2026 Xinyi Christine Zhang