FOREVER · 2023 – 2026
Modernizing a platform built to last 100 years
FOREVER promises to keep a family’s photos, videos and documents for a lifetime plus 100 years. As Principal Product Designer and head of a small design team, my job was making the product around that promise easier to understand, easier to buy, and ready for what comes next — including AI.
The two-minute version
- FOREVER had a strong promise and a sprawling product — desktop apps, a web platform, mobile, services and a community — that had grown in layers over many years. Growth had stalled.
- I led UX and product design across all of it — and the small team of designers doing it — partnering with executives on roadmap and priorities, and focused on the moments that mattered most — understanding the offer, choosing a plan, getting memories in, and finding them again.
- Conversion and usability improvements contributed to more than $1M in annual revenue growth and helped return the company to 15% year-over-year growth. I also explored and shipped early AI features, from automated photo captions to AI help with family history.
A great promise, wrapped in a lot of product.
FOREVER sells something unusual: permanent storage. Pay once, and your family’s photos, videos and documents are preserved, protected and available for your lifetime plus 100 years — no ads, no data mining. Around that core it offers digitization of old media, desktop software for organizing and designing, printed products and gifts, and a community of ambassadors and designers.
That’s a lot of product, and it had been built up over many years. The offer is unusual enough that it’s easy for a new visitor to misread what they’re buying or why it costs what it does. Existing customers moved between desktop apps, the website and mobile with different patterns everywhere. And after several years of flat growth, the business needed the product to pull its weight.
Everything connects to everything.
An unusual offer
“Permanent” storage priced per gigabyte, one-time or monthly, is genuinely different from a Google Photos subscription — and has to be explained in seconds.
Many surfaces
Desktop software, a web platform, mobile apps, services, community tools and internal tools, all sharing one account and one catalog.
Layers of history
Years of features and patterns meant modernization had to happen in place, without breaking long-time customers’ workflows.
Revenue on the line
Every change to plans, pricing pages and upgrade paths touched a business that needed to start growing again.
Head of design, hands-on, next to the exec team.
What I owned
- End-to-end UX and product design across desktop, mobile, web, community and internal tools
- Information architecture, search and discovery, onboarding and personalization
- Conversion and monetization: plans, pricing, upgrade and gifting paths
- Managing and mentoring a small team of junior designers; setting design standards
- Partnering with executives on roadmap and prioritization
- Exploring and shipping early AI features
What the wider team owned
- Engineering across desktop, web and mobile
- Marketing, brand and campaigns
- Customer care, digitization operations and partners
- Finance and pricing decisions
Map the ecosystem before you move anything in it.
The first step was getting a shared picture of the ecosystem — every surface a customer might touch, how they connected to one account, and where people fell between them. That map became the basis for IA decisions and for arguing about priorities with evidence instead of opinions.
Where the money and the frustration were.
Make an unusual offer easy to understand — and easy to buy.
Most people have never bought “permanent” storage. The plan and pricing experience had to answer three questions fast: what do I get, why is it worth it, and how do I pay? We leaned on concrete equivalents (roughly how many photos fit), plain-language benefits, and a clear choice between spreading payments out or paying once.
- Price per gigabyte next to the monthly price, so bigger plans visibly get better value.
- Concrete, not abstract: “approximately 3,750–12,500 photos,” full resolution, no compression.
- The promise in plain language: permanence, the Guarantee Fund, no data mining or advertising.
- Pay monthly or once. One simple toggle for the biggest decision on the page.
- Buy or gift as equal choices — gifting is a real reason people buy storage.
Positioning against the obvious alternative, honestly.
Storage as a gift, with every tier visible at once.
One account, one set of patterns, across desktop, web and mobile.
Customers move between the desktop uploader, the website and their phones. We brought account, storage and navigation patterns into line so the same questions — how much space do I have, where are my orders, how do I get more — have the same answers everywhere.
- Storage is always visible — and “Add storage” sits right where you notice you’re running out.
- Notifications on the avatar, consistent across collapsed and expanded states.
- Collapsed navigation variants for smaller windows and the desktop app.
- Primary actions stay close: upload, create album, new group, search.
Valet desktop: plan and upgrade path inside the app.
Mobile: the promise, first.
The same library on every screen.
Turn a long, anxious wait into a visible process.
Sending a box of old tapes and photos to be digitized is an act of trust — and it takes weeks. For digitization orders, including partner orders like Photobucket’s, we designed order tracking that shows each stage in plain language, what’s happening right now, and when it should be done.
- All orders in one place for customers with multiple boxes.
- Every stage named, from shipped to quality review — no black box.
- What’s happening now, explained in human terms.
- An estimated completion date, because “weeks” isn’t an answer.
Use AI where it removes real work — and keep people in charge of their story.
Family archives are huge and mostly unlabeled. We put AI to work on exactly that: facial recognition that finds and groups the people in thousands of photos, AI Enhance, which turns a quick note (“Becka and James on cool crisp evening walk in October”) into a richer description, and AI help with captions and family-history projects.
The design principle was simple: the AI suggests, the family decides. AI Enhance puts the original words next to the enhanced version and offers three equal choices — keep the original, keep both, or accept the enhanced text. Nothing about someone’s history gets rewritten without them.
Facial recognition: find the people who matter, then name them once.
AI Enhance, introduced to Facial Recognition customers.
Grow the account from storage into a platform people keep paying for.
Storage is a one-time decision; the business needed reasons to come back. We designed paid capabilities that build on what’s already in the account — facial recognition, video streaming and a new in-browser video editor (trim clips, add title covers, merge videos) — and priced each with a clear subscription-or-permanent choice.
Video editing, built into the account: clips and title covers.
Subscription or permanent — the same choice pattern across products.
The platform, as shipped.
My team and I designed across the whole of forever.com and its apps — everything except the Create & Print product line. These are the live pages today.
Store, access and own
One account on mobile, web, TV and desktop.
Succession: designing for what happens after you.
TV apps for Fire TV and Google TV.
Valet, positioned for people with huge legacy collections.
Digitize and preserve
Digitization: the front door for a lot of new customers.
Every format, browsable — so people know their box of tapes is covered.
Services and tools
Genealogy research and coaching services.
Valet Pro for people who manage many family accounts.
From the archive
Valet — the desktop uploader and library.
Historian — desktop organizing software, and its path into a FOREVER account.
Video streaming plans as gifts.
Valet identity.
Running a small team, and a seat at the roadmap table.
I led a small team of junior designers — a couple of people — and we worked collaboratively across the entire platform. With a team that size, leadership is mostly practical: pointing people at the problems that matter most, reviewing work closely enough to catch issues early, giving them room to own pieces of the product, and setting standards so desktop, web and mobile stopped drifting apart — while I still designed a lot of it myself.
A lot of my impact was also in how decisions got made. I partnered with executives on the roadmap and prioritization, and made the case for spending design time where it would move conversion and usability — which is where the revenue growth came from.
Growth, after years of standing still.
- Annual revenue growth from conversion and usability improvements
- $1M+
- Year-over-year growth, after several years of stagnation
- 15%
What this project says about how I work.
Business impact
Conversion and monetization work that shows up in revenue.
Platform thinking
One coherent experience across desktop, web, mobile and services.
Leading a team
Managing and growing junior designers while staying hands-on, and partnering with execs on the roadmap.
AI, responsibly
Using AI to remove real work, with people staying in charge.
“The platform, as shipped” screens are captures of the live forever.com, shown with permission; Create & Print was designed by others and isn’t shown.