Self guided stories
in every city

I've been working on how I can make each story location in Storydex feel more like a little museum exhibit on your phone. I'm sketching ways to layer the stories with quick interactions, artifacts, short audio clips, and small immersive moments. The best museum exhibits I've worked on stage a scene and let you do something, and that "doing" is what makes the story stick. I'm borrowing those tricks and keeping everything lightweight so it doesn't slow you down on a walk. So far, early prototypes already feel more alive than plain text. The goal is that you remember a place more clearly after you close the app. More soon, I'll share experiments as they harden into real pieces.

One thing that's been slowing down my own walks lately has been the time it takes for Storydex audio to load. I use the app while exploring neighborhoods, listening to the audio version of stories as I walk, but sometimes it took 40–50 seconds to start, long enough that I'd already be halfway to the next site.

So with this update, I added real-time audio streaming. Now playback starts within about five seconds of pressing play, even while you're moving between stops. It makes the app feel way more responsive and better suited for exploring on foot. I've been testing it around town this week, and it's been surprisingly nice to have each story begin right when you want it to.

I rebuilt the map over the last month, so instead of loading locations every time you move around, Storydex now runs off its own location database. That means locations load instantly, and you can zoom out to a new world heatmap to see every story location at once. I also found that a lot of nature-related spots had very thin info, which made the map noisy. My original plan was to use Storydex on hikes, learning about geology and rivers as easily as city blocks, but those low-info natural spots were crowding out the richer places. For now, I pulled most of those from the database until I can bring natural areas back in a more curated way. These updates are now live on the app store!