Privacy-Period-Tracker/docs/design/README.md

Design

Status: Current
Owner: _null
Last reviewed: 2026-08-18
Governs: docs/design/**, core/designsystem/**, app/src/main/kotlin/**,
         app/src/main/res/values/** — the design tokens, every user-facing
         screen, 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, typography, motion	§37, §38, §40, §41
Colour	§39 — superseded by BRAND_GUIDE.md; see Colour below
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". Every screen that shows a fertility estimate carries the not-contraception line, which is where §18 scopes it — "near fertility features and in About". Notification copy is the deliberate exception: it says "Estimated fertile window" and stops, because a disclaimer is a long sentence about fertility on a lock screen.

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).

The banner space is reserved before there is an ad to put in it. §48 wants no layout jump when one loads and a graceful gap when one fails, and both are properties of the space existing whether or not it is filled. Retrofitting the reservation in Batch 07 means shipping the jump first and finding it in a QA round. It is empty and invisible now — deliberately not a "your ad here" box, which would be a placeholder for the thing a user pays to remove.

Colour

The palette is BRAND_GUIDE.md, supplied by the project owner on 2026-08-18. It supersedes the sketch in ../planning/PRODUCT_PLAN.md §39 where the two differ, and one difference is worth stating rather than leaving to be discovered:

§39 asks for a muted teal or sage fertile window. The brand guide is plum and rose throughout, and gives fertility its own pink (#E891AE).

The guide wins — it is newer, it is the owner's, and a teal accent inside this identity would look borrowed from another app. What §39 was protecting is kept by other means, and this is the part that matters: the calendar's states differ in shape, not only in colour. A solid disc, a dotted ring, a continuous ring and a star stay tellable apart in greyscale and to a colourblind user, which is what §43 actually requires. Colour is the second signal here, never the only one.

The two rules from §39 that survive unchanged, because they are product decisions rather than colour preferences:

• Period state is a sophisticated rose or plum — never graphic blood-red.
• Nothing reads as "safe". The fertile window is pink rather than green for the same reason the labels say "Lower likelihood": this app never gives permission.

Everything goes through Material 3 colour roles and centralized tokens in core/designsystem. No hard-coded colours in a Composable — 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.

A row for an unbuilt feature is absent, not disabled

Settings is built as PRODUCT_PLAN.md §36 structures it, and it shows only the sections that have something behind them. Privacy & Security arrives with the issues that fill it; Appearance and Premium with their batches.

The alternative — every §36 row present and greyed out — is worse here than in most apps. A disabled Export My Data is a promise with no delivery date, and a disabled Delete My Data tells a user that the control over their own health data exists and that they may not have it. In a product whose entire argument is that the data is theirs, that is a bad first thing to say.

Absent is honest, and the tracker is where the plan lives — which is the same rule ../data/README.md applies to placeholder images, for the same reason: something that looks finished outlives the issue that would have replaced 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 real now, and the replaceable names are why that was cheap

Every illustration in the app is the owner's own drawing, in a matched light and dark pair, in core/designsystem/src/main/res/. The sources and the decisions behind them are in dist/.

That swap changed one function body per illustration and no screen's layout, because PRODUCT_PLAN.md §42's advice was followed literally when there was nothing to draw with: polished placeholders behind replaceable names. The names did not change when the drawings did. That is the whole argument for the rule, and it is worth keeping for the artwork still to come.

These are raster, and §42 still holds. Its preference list ends "avoid unnecessary raster imagery", and it offers placeholder vectors as the fallback for artwork that does not exist. The artwork exists, and it is gradient landscapes with glow and depth — there is no honest VectorDrawable of one. The whole set costs 130 KB of the release APK.

The calendar markers stay vectors, and so does CycleProgressMark. They are drawn from data — a marker's shape is what a day is, and the progress arc is where the user actually stands in their cycle. No amount of good artwork makes those images.

The theme swap is resource resolution, not a branch. Each drawable has a drawable-night/ twin, so Android picks it and the artwork follows a device theme change with no code of ours involved. The cost is that a missing night asset is invisible in light mode, which is why the preview pair in OnboardingPreviews.kt has one entry per illustration.

Still placeholder: the launcher icon, which keeps its simplified vector because the supplied emblem has content close to its edges and an adaptive icon masks about a quarter of the canvas away, so dropping it in unmodified would crop the shield. Fitting it to the safe zone is issue #30.

What the artwork has to do

Two things at once, stated by the owner and recorded here because it is the brief every remaining art issue is judged against: welcoming, and visibly private. Not alternating between them screen by screen — a warm opening followed by a bare form is how onboarding reads today, and the privacy idea currently appears on exactly one screen out of seven.

Welcoming is the harder half to get right without breaking Tone: warmth here means an app that looks like it was made with care, never one that celebrates a period or decorates it. Private is already half-solved in the vocabulary — PrivacyIllustration encloses a ring in a shield, and enclosure reads as protection without reaching for a padlock, which would read as a security product rather than a calm one.

The onboarding brief has been answered: eight illustrations, both themes, now shipping in the app. dist/ holds the sources and the reasoning — no text painted into the pixels, no step numbers, and a forecast illustration that names no fields so it cannot contradict the live one beside it.

The art still outstanding is tracked as issues #30 to #32, not listed here.

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