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

Focus Seed 1.0.1 Experience Brief

Status: approved product and design principles, 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. Coherence without genre constraints

   • Clay, cyberpunk, glass, paper, floating surfaces, editorial layouts, and other labels are exploration vocabulary, not requirements or exclusions.
   • Derive the visual language from the product's calm focus loop, information hierarchy, interaction needs, audience, accessibility, localization, and performance constraints.
   • Select one primary visual grammar after reviewing three complete routes. A small secondary contrast is welcome when it makes a meaningful state, reward, or transition clearer and more memorable.
   • Do not mix styles casually or pursue novelty at the expense of clarity. Every visible difference must have a product reason.
   • 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 materially different full-screen directions using the same Today and Timer content. Generate these routes from the product brief each time rather than filling fixed style categories.

The routes may use any visual tradition or combination that has a defensible product rationale. Organic clay, quiet precision, botanical editorial, cyberpunk, glass, paper, spatial depth, or a new hybrid are examples only. No genre receives automatic preference or rejection.

Each route must show how its visual choices improve:

• Task clarity and one-handed ease of use
• Calmness, comfort, and low cognitive load
• Immediate tap, state, transition, and completion feedback
• Brand recognition and the seed-growth metaphor
• Accessibility, localization, dark mode, and responsive layouts
• Smooth rendering and restrained battery use on ordinary Android devices

Every route must also be designed as a stateful product system, not as a static poster. Stress-test the same visual language with:

• Empty, first-use, populated, loading, saving, success, recoverable error, and destructive-confirmation states
• Timer idle, running, paused, background-restored, completed, and interrupted states
• Zero, one, several, completed, archived, and long-named habits
• Short and long anchors, translated text expansion, large system text, RTL, and narrow/wide layouts
• Dynamic list growth, scrolling, keyboard appearance, safe areas, and bottom-navigation persistence
• Content changes that must not cause layout jumps, clipped actions, hidden status, or accidental taps

Evaluate the three routes with the same weighted scorecard:

• Usability and task clarity: 30%
• Comfort and cognitive load: 20%
• Interaction and motion coherence: 15%
• Visual hierarchy and readability: 15%
• Distinctiveness and emotional appeal: 10%
• Accessibility and global adaptability: 5%
• Performance feasibility: 5%

The highest score is not automatically selected. Resolve any weak core-flow score first, then use informed visual judgment to choose the most compelling complete experience.

The chosen visual route must define:

• Color tokens and contrast states
• Typography scale
• Surface/elevation model
• Icon treatment
• Illustration/growth system
• Rules for deliberate visual contrast and where it is not allowed
• 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
• Component behavior across data density, asynchronous state, lifecycle restoration, and content growth

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.
• Empty, dense, loading, error, long-content, and lifecycle-restored states preserve hierarchy and access to the primary action.
• 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.