Study 02 · October 2, 2026
The scrapbook is the working direction. This pass addresses two risks: an archive that becomes visually repetitive, and a Home that greets every visit with the same introduction.
The original UX report, Linear context, September meeting, and first visual study remain the brief. Quiet participation, useful content before contribution requests, inclusive discovery, and explicit privacy boundaries still guide the work.
A personal invitation explains the value and privacy boundaries before asking for an email. Two steps follow: confirm your email, then choose whether other members can find you. The interface gives neither directory option a preselected answer. People who choose quiet browsing can enter without supplying a name, years, affiliation, photo, biography or story.
The email is simulated in a visibly separate sample inbox. The reviewer can expire a link, request another, open the previous email, change the address, and replay a used link. These have distinct recovery messages. The link expires after fifteen minutes in the running preview; requesting another invalidates older links. No real email is sent and no real account exists.
The first implementation still asked quiet browsers for an optional name and led every new member with people. Review showed both were unnecessary burdens. Quiet browsing now asks for no name; a story leads for unlisted members or when no shared years are available. Recognition leads when a listed member has matching years. There is no profile-completion checklist and no contribution needed to finish the visit.
The first visit confirms the chosen visibility once, with a direct route to change it. Opening a story, saving it, finding it under Saved items, and returning to the archive work in the same page session. The existing mosaic and reading interactions remain available.
These are proposed product decisions for evaluation, not changes to an adopted production policy. Compared with apps/portal/docs/product-requirements.md, this experiment removes the inviter’s conversion notification, changes community-email enrollment to opt-in, verifies email before collecting a directory profile, and defers phone, affiliations, detailed role history, biography and photo. It collects a last initial rather than a full last name. User authorization in this conversation delegates these prototype design choices; Linear and production requirements have not been edited.
The policy disclosures are short drafts for review. Formal legal terms, consent versioning, retention, deletion, staff access controls and authentication security remain production work. New-member credentials and link checks are in-memory simulations, not secure access controls. A reload intentionally resets the journey. Profile year editing after joining, delivery failures, cross-device verification, existing-account sign-in, revoked invitations and contributions/contact/RSVP audiences remain outside this first slice.
Browser checks covered listed and unlisted entry, empty and multiple year ranges, reversed-range and email validation, expired/superseded/used links, corrected email, directory appearance and removal, escaping user-entered names, saving the first story, focus restoration, and navigation. The flow was checked at desktop, 390px and 320px widths. The original twenty-piece mosaic and returning-home progression also passed regression checks. These are implementation checks, not evidence from representative users or a formal accessibility audit.
Journey 1 is this invitation and first visit. Journey 2 should cover finding a person and choosing how to connect, including consent and contact disclosure. Pause after that second journey to establish typography roles, density, spacing, surfaces, forms, cards, dialogs, focus and feedback patterns. Use a third journey only if a key pattern remains unresolved. Apply that system consistently to the remaining journeys. Warm scrapbook character, varied archive content and a platform-owned palette remain the direction; fine visual polish is not the task yet.
The collection expands from six to twenty pieces. Photograph proportions stay intact, with two wider landscape photographs. Memories use paper-like surfaces and comfortable serif reading text. Transcripts, documents, and milestones have distinct treatments. Main headings and controls retain Instrument Sans, with calmer weights and fewer competing accents.
The mosaic follows the source reading order. It does not shuffle cards randomly or backfill earlier holes with later items. On a phone it becomes one readable column. Search, item type, and year range can be combined. The first twelve pieces load initially, with an explicit route to the remaining eight.
Details open in a reading view with the full image or quotation, attribution, context, saving, a link to that era, and previous/next navigation. Close returns to the original card and keeps the collection’s filters, loaded items, and scroll position.
Navigation and the Home sections stay dependable. The lead has a reason to change. The reviewer can select five explicit situations; these are demonstration fixtures, not a deployed personalization engine.
| Visit | Lead and meaning |
|---|---|
| First visit | People from 1994–1999 introduce the member to the community. A photograph provides an immediate, low-pressure way to explore. |
| Returning, additions | Three archive pieces were added after the simulated September 26 visit. Unseen pieces from the member’s years come first, then other new additions. A historic item’s year stays separate from its added date. |
| Gathering soon | The October 6 online volunteer call leads in the October 2 fixture. Its date, online format, and host are explicit. Other gatherings remain below, avoiding a duplicate of the lead. |
| Quiet week | No upcoming events or new wall posts. An older item is explicitly labeled “Worth another look” and “An archive selection.” The member can choose another item; the page does not shuffle on its own. |
| Small community | Three people, no overlapping years, three archive pieces, no new posts, and no events. Existing content is still worthwhile; the page does not manufacture activity. |
Opening a new addition counts as seen within the preview. Returning to Home selects the next unseen addition. When all three have been opened, Home says the latest archive additions have been seen and offers rediscovery. It does not claim that the person is caught up on all community activity.
People remain reachable through the same navigation and supporting section. The community wall remains optional in the review controls. One gentle memory prompt follows useful content; there are no leaderboards, streaks, or profile-completion demands.
These are provisional design values. They illustrate an independent platform palette, not a settled tenant-theming contract. No new production theme or CRM tokens were introduced.
Journey 1 now selects a coherent experimental model for directory visibility, invitation feedback and community-email defaults, described above. These choices await product validation. Waves and contact exchange, RSVP disclosure, contribution attribution/review/publishing and the community wall remain open. The prototype does not send invitations, book events or publish contributions. A memory remains a local draft.
The meeting’s recovery celebrations, program check-ins, exit invitations, and rollout ideas remain background for later product decisions. Their absence from this layout study is not a scope decision. The five journeys in the UX report remain the brief for deeper interaction work.
This study is published at alumni-prototype.avenir.dev. The link stays the same as completed iterations are published. It has its own static hosting project and publishing repository. Accounts, email and other member actions remain simulated.
Source images and fixtures come from the same Magic Patterns v45 artifact. Historical captions, attribution, dates, people, and added dates are design fixtures, not independently verified facts. Portraits and document illustrations from the source prototype are generated placeholders. Wall text is fictional sample content. No live community activity or production data is loaded.
State lasts only while the preview is open. Resetting or changing a reviewer scenario clears it. Archive selection order is curated fixture order; production ranking, time windows, and repeat-exposure rules still require validation. Original audio is not supplied: voice cards explicitly offer readable transcript excerpts.
21de12e5-9f11-4088-8d83-1b8515ec67b5.