2479a1ddf4
Seven screens, §19 and §56 verbatim: welcome, last period, period end, previous
history, the privacy promise, notification privacy, first forecast. Verified end
to end on a device — the flow produces a forecast, the record persists, and a
relaunch goes straight to Today.
Three decisions with tests behind them:
- Nothing is written until the final step. Somebody who abandons onboarding
halfway has not asked this app to remember anything about them.
- Notification privacy is Discreet before the user touches anything (§28), and
Direct is last and never pre-selected. Checked on the device, not only in a
unit test.
- "Still going" and "I'm not sure" both mean no end date. §24: never invent
one. The date picker refuses future dates by not offering them rather than
by rejecting a tap it allowed.
DARK MODE WAS BROKEN FOR ALL OF BATCH 01
PeriodTheme never wrapped its content in a Surface, so every Text without an
explicit colour inherited Material's default — black — and the app background
never painted. In light mode that looked correct by accident, because dark text
on cream is what was wanted anyway. In dark mode the onboarding headings
rendered near-black on charcoal.
No test caught it and no test easily would have. It was found by opening the
app on a device and looking at it.
The Surface now lives in the theme, so a screen without a Scaffold cannot
forget, and every illustration has a light/dark preview pair. A preview is not
a test, but it is the cheapest thing that puts the failure in front of whoever
is editing the screen.
closes #16
|
||
|---|---|---|
| .. | ||
| README.md | ||
README.md
Design
Status: Current
Owner: _null
Last reviewed: 2026-08-18
Governs: docs/design/**, the design tokens in core/designsystem, and the product's
tone and interface copy
Review trigger: Any new user-facing screen or state; any change to the colour or
type tokens; any change to notification copy or to a privacy or
fertility disclaimer
Where the detail is
The screen-by-screen specification and the actual words are
../planning/PRODUCT_PLAN.md, and they are not
repeated here — a second copy of interface copy is how two versions of a
disclaimer come to exist.
| Subject | Section it owns |
|---|---|
| Onboarding, seven screens, with copy | §19, §56 |
| Navigation — four tabs | §20 |
| Today screen and its six dynamic states | §21, §22 |
| Period logging, period end, spotting | §23, §24, §25 |
| Calendar states and markers | §26 |
| Insights | §27 |
| Notification modes, types and flow | §28, §29, §30 |
| Incognito launcher | §32 |
| Look and feel, visual direction, colour, typography, motion | §37–§41 |
| Artwork | §42 |
| Accessibility | §43 |
This document holds what governs those: the tone, and the rules that decide an argument the specification did not anticipate.
Tone
Calm, private, intelligent, adult. The app is a good utility with warmth — it is not clinical, not childish, not gamified, and not stereotypically feminine as an identity. It never celebrates a period and never alarms about one.
One paragraph, and it settles most small arguments: the app speaks like someone competent who is not making a fuss. "Your period is late!" is out. "Not yet?" with an updated forecast is in.
Four rules that decide the arguments
1. The number is the hero. The forecast dominates the Today screen — §38. Anything competing with it for attention is wrong, including anything of ours.
2. Nothing asserts certainty the model does not have. A window and a confidence label, never a bare exact date presented as fact. "Estimated ovulation", never "you are ovulating today". Fertility copy carries the not-contraception line wherever it appears.
3. State is never colour alone. Confirmed period is a solid fill, predicted is dotted or outlined, fertile window is a ring, ovulation is its own small marker — distinguishable in greyscale, because that is also what makes them distinguishable to a colourblind user and to a screenshot in a bug report. Predicted and confirmed days must never look identical.
4. Ads never touch a health action. No banner in onboarding, in the period-start confirmation, in the period-end confirmation, or between steps of a health workflow — and never an interstitial after logging (§33). Banner space is reserved in the layout so a failed ad does not move the content.
Colour, in one line each
The palette is §39; the constraints on it are:
- Not pink as the whole identity. Deep plum, muted berry, soft lavender, warm cream, charcoal, muted sage/teal.
- Period state is a sophisticated berry or plum — never graphic blood-red.
- Fertile window is muted teal or sage — never bright green, which reads as safe and this app must never say that.
- Everything goes through Material 3 colour roles and centralized tokens in
core/designsystem. No hard-coded colours in a Composable — the guard is that a colour literal outside the token file is a review failure.
Both themes, every time
Dark mode was broken for the whole of Batch 01 and nothing said so. PeriodTheme
was not wrapping its content in a Surface, so any Text without an explicit
colour inherited Material's default — black — and the app's own background never
painted at all. In light mode that looked correct by accident, because dark
text on cream is what was wanted anyway; in dark mode the onboarding headings
were near-black on charcoal.
No test caught it and no test easily would. It was found by opening the app.
Two rules follow. Every screen gets a preview pair, light and dark — cheap,
and it puts the failure in front of whoever is editing. And the Surface lives
in the theme rather than in each screen, so a screen without a Scaffold cannot
forget it.
The states most often left undesigned
Designed here on purpose, because they are the two most people meet first:
- Empty — no periods logged yet. It has to make the next action obvious rather than apologise.
- Learning — one or two cycles recorded. The app says it is still learning rather than showing a confident forecast it has not earned. "Getting to know your pattern", not a percentage.
The artwork is placeholder, and says so here
Every illustration and calendar marker in the app is a Compose vector path
in core/designsystem/src/main/kotlin/dev/privacyllc/period/designsystem/art/, written as PRODUCT_PLAN.md §42 asks: polished
placeholders behind replaceable names, so real artwork changes one function body
and no call site.
The visual language is deliberately narrow — overlapping circular forms and nothing else. §42's forbidden list (blood drops, tampons, pads, uterus imagery, gender symbols, anatomy) is a product decision rather than squeamishness: this app gets opened in public, and somebody glancing over a shoulder should learn nothing. That is a property of the pictures as much as of the notification text.
Note the deliberate inconsistency with docs/data/img/, where a placeholder
is forbidden. The rule there is that an image which looks finished outlives the
issue that would have replaced it, because nobody files a ticket against
something that appears done. In-app assets escape that because §42 asks for them
explicitly and the replaceable-name mechanism is what keeps them replaceable —
and because a screen with no illustration cannot be evaluated at all, while a
project card with no icon simply shows initials.
Include the rejected version
For any decision that was genuinely close, record what was not chosen and why.
Without it the same option is proposed again every few months and re-argued from
nothing. The first entries belong to whoever makes those calls; the
specification's Avoid: lists are already a partial record of them.
What does not belong here
- How it is built —
../architecture/README.md - Scope and audience —
../planning/PROJECT_PLAN.md