Side project 02/Roux HQ/Family app · Client work
A family app organized around the child — not around the app
01 / Why
Hannah Mercier had just become a mother. She went looking for one app that could hold the whole of family life — the activities, the meals, the milestones, the endless registration deadlines — found nothing that did it, and decided to have it built.
Somewhere in that first conversation we worked out that our children had been born on the same day of the same year — a coincidence, but a useful one. I didn’t have to imagine this user.
So the project never had a discovery phase. It had two parents who already knew the problem by heart, and a standing review every week.
A parent doesn't think in data types. A parent thinks: what does Hugo need today?
02 / The bet
03 / Structure
The tab bar has three items and never grew. Each answers a question a parent is already asking, in the words they'd use to ask it — so nothing sits more than one tap from the question it answers.
Onboarding asks four things per child — name, nickname, birthday, allergies — and never asks again. The birthday decides which milestones surface. The allergies quietly filter every meal suggestion. And the name becomes a chip: the same control, in the same position, on five different surfaces.
The child chip — defined once
04 / Moments
Home01 / 12
Moment 01 — Today, not everything
Weather, one activity, one meal, and what’s coming. Every other screen is a library; this is the one screen that makes a decision on your behalf — and it names the reason out loud: “Perfect for Hugo (age 9) on a cozy morning.” Naming the child turns an algorithm into attention.
Moment 02 — Two kinds of time
The first is what you have already committed to. This is the calendar you trust — if it is on here, it is happening, and someone in the house has to be there.
Toddler music circles, library story time, the farmers’ market. Mixing possibilities into a calendar of commitments is how you end up with a calendar you stop believing — so they are separate tabs over the same grid. Same dates, same colours, completely different contract.
Not when the thing happens — when signing up opens and closes. Camp sign-up opens Tue Sep 10. Soccer registration closes Thu Sep 12. This is the class of deadline that costs families a whole season, and no calendar app carries it, because it isn’t an event.
Moment 03 — Celebrate, don’t assess
Upcoming milestones sit above achieved ones — a horizon, then a record. There is no progress bar anywhere in this flow, because a progress bar implies a schedule a child can fall behind. Even the empty state refuses to be clinical: “Start tracking your child’s growth journey. Add milestones to celebrate every achievement.”
Moment 04 — The voice
Miss Roux was Hannah’s — the name, the character. What the product needed was a register. I wrote every daily thought in it: one per day, one sentence, always something you can do this afternoon. Never a question, never congratulations.
05 / The brief
Warm and inclusive.
That was the whole visual direction. A logo is not a product language — what I had to work out was how a circus tent becomes an interface you look at one-handed at six in the morning.
The last three exist for one screen: week view, where several children's schedules stack in the same column. They're desaturated to within a hair of each other on purpose — no child's day should look louder than another's.
Warm is easy to overshoot into childish. Three rules kept it honest: brick appears once per screen and always belongs to the thing you're meant to tap; a bookish serif carries every heading, so the product reads as written rather than generated; and a paper grain sits under everything, which is what stops warm from turning into plastic.
06 / The system
Two months is not enough time to invent a new pattern per screen, and a product this broad can't afford one anyway. Six components carry the entire app. Everything below is cropped from a delivered screen, not redrawn for this page. The states those patterns produce come next.
Twenty-one more frames exist only when something is saved, deleted, cancelled, mistyped or still empty. Six of them here, because they carry the one rule I'd defend hardest: every confirmation puts the destructive action in an outline and the safe action in solid brick.
Delete sits quietly beside Keep; “Yes, cancel” beside “Keep subscription”. In a product built on a record of what your child has done, the default has to be keep. Toasts never congratulate you — they say where the thing went. Errors give an example rather than a rule. And nothing is ever just blank.
Delete / Keep
Cancel / Keep subscription
Payment issue
Milestone achieved
Field-level errors
Empty calendar07 / Every screen
Every screen in the delivered file, grouped by the flow it belongs to. Each row scrolls sideways — use the arrows, drag it, or let it drift as you scroll. Hover a long screen and it scrolls itself; click any of them to open it full size.
08 / Handoff
No kickoff deck, no research phase, no stakeholder map. We talked often, I posted work on a fixed cadence, and Hannah left her comments directly on the frames in Figma.
My client was also my user — so every review was a usability test, just an unusually honest one. Worth naming the limit too: one deeply informed user is still one user. A second parent would have disagreed with something on this page.
The designs and the prototype were delivered in December 2025. Hannah took them to a development team; the build isn't mine and I don't have usage data. So there are no metrics on this page — only decisions, and the reasoning behind them.
Writing the copy is the design. I couldn't work out what Miss Roux should be until I'd written thirty of her thoughts and thrown most of them away — and designing for a household turned out to mean designing for a group that shares one login. Almost every hard decision came from that, not from the feature list.
