gp/launch/roadmaps/v1.0.1-experience-brief.md

Focus Seed 1.0.1 Experience Brief

Status: approved product direction, visual route not yet selected.

Product Intent

Focus Seed should feel exceptionally calm, responsive, and effortless even though its feature set is intentionally small. Product quality comes from the complete experience: clear flows, immediate feedback, reliable behavior, thoughtful motion, coherent visual identity, and low cognitive load.

The differentiated loop is:

Choose today's anchor -> focus -> complete one small habit -> reflect -> see the seed grow

Every screen and feature should strengthen this loop. Generic feature accumulation is not a goal.

Design Principles

1. One coherent visual language

   • Do not mix clay, cyberpunk, glass, paper, and flat Material styles indiscriminately.
   • Select one primary direction after reviewing three complete visual routes.
   • The chosen route must work in light/dark mode, on low-end Android devices, and across supported languages.

2. Interaction before decoration

   • Primary actions must be obvious and reachable.
   • Taps acknowledge immediately through state, motion, and selective haptics.
   • Navigation preserves context and never surprises the user.
   • Dialogs are reserved for confirmation, focused input, or meaningful decisions.

3. Motion with purpose

   • Tap/state feedback: 100-160ms.
   • Component transitions: 160-240ms.
   • Page or major-state transitions: 220-320ms.
   • Respect reduced-motion settings.
   • Avoid continuous decorative animation, layout shifts, and motion that delays input.

4. Reliability is part of UX

   • Timer state must survive backgrounding, interruption, and process recreation.
   • A session cannot be recorded as fully completed without valid elapsed time or explicit, honest manual entry.
   • Saving, deleting, importing, and restoring data must have clear success and recovery states.

5. Global-ready foundations

   • Move user-facing strings into ARB localization files.
   • Format dates, numbers, durations, and plurals by locale.
   • Support longer translated strings, text scaling, and RTL-safe layout primitives.
   • Country availability, store listing language, privacy, pricing, and in-app language remain separate release decisions.

6. Accessibility by default

   • Minimum comfortable touch targets.
   • Strong contrast in both themes.
   • Semantic labels for icon-only controls and progress.
   • Keyboard/focus order where relevant.
   • Test at increased system font sizes.

Visual Direction Gate

Before implementation, create and review exactly three full-screen directions using the same Today and Timer content:

1. Organic Clay Growth, recommended starting point

   • Soft dimensional seed/growth objects, restrained tactile depth, calm teal and warm yellow.
   • Strong brand fit without turning the whole UI into toy-like clay controls.

2. Quiet Precision

   • Crisp typography, calm surfaces, subtle floating depth, high information clarity.
   • Best for long-term productivity credibility and accessibility.

3. Botanical Editorial

   • More expressive type and organic composition, grounded by functional controls.
   • Stronger emotional identity but higher localization and layout risk.

Cyberpunk is not the default recommendation for this product. It can look striking, but its high-energy visual language conflicts with calm focus and broad global accessibility unless research demonstrates a specific audience fit.

The chosen visual route must define:

• Color tokens and contrast states
• Typography scale
• Surface/elevation model
• Icon treatment
• Illustration/growth system
• Navigation and tab behavior
• Dialog, sheet, menu, snackbar, empty, loading, error, success, and destructive states
• Motion curves and durations
• Light/dark behavior
• Localization and text-expansion behavior

1.0.1 Priority Order

P0: Trust And Stability

• Timer lifecycle based on timestamps, not only an in-memory periodic timer.
• Background/foreground/process-restoration behavior.
• Honest session completion rules.
• Persistence growth plan and migration tests.
• More unit, widget, and lifecycle tests.

P1: Signature Experience

• Seed-growth feedback tied to meaningful user progress.
• Smoother navigation and continuity between Today, Timer, Habits, and Reflect.
• Refined input, dialog, deletion, save, and completion flows.
• Clear first-run experience that reaches the first useful action quickly.

P1: International Foundation

• English ARB baseline.
• Locale-aware dates, durations, and plurals.
• Responsive phone/tablet constraints.
• Text scaling and RTL-ready component structure.

P2: Retention And Completeness

• Gentle reminders only after explicit user choice.
• Better history and progress explanation.
• Useful widgets or shortcuts after the core loop is stable.
• Export/import refinement and future database migration path.

Monetization Guardrail

The free product must complete the full Daily Anchor Loop. Do not put an ad or paywall in front of choosing an anchor, starting/finishing a timer, checking a habit, saving a reflection, or deleting/exporting personal data.

Preferred paid value:

• Advanced history and reports
• Additional themes and growth environments
• Home-screen widgets
• Custom focus routines
• Enhanced export formats
• Cloud backup/sync only if a real service is introduced

Preferred order:

1. Validate retention and repeated use.
2. Test a one-time Pro unlock.
3. Consider subscription only when ongoing services create ongoing value and cost.
4. Add ads only if they can remain outside the core loop and do not reduce trust.

Acceptance Signals

1.0.1 is successful when:

• The timer remains correct through backgrounding and restoration.
• Main actions respond immediately and consistently.
• No screen overflows at supported text scales and locales.
• Users can explain the Daily Anchor Loop after one session.
• Testers return without being prompted solely for testing compliance.
• Visual identity is recognizable without sacrificing clarity or performance.