A working brief for the She & HER app — pulled from the May 8 planning conversation. We're not redesigning what's pretty. We're renaming the room the pretty things live in.
We held the planning meeting on Pride and the beta and the conversation kept coming back to one thing: the swipe is pretty, the brand is pretty, and the architecture under both is starting to feel like a costume. Events are too expensive to be the engine. Community-first as the headline confused the dating-app pitch we re-anchored to on April 29. And the existing app — when held next to Lex — looks more intentional than its competitors but doesn't yet teach you how to use it.
This brief takes that decision and makes it operable. One umbrella, four paths under it, a guided walkthrough that holds the user's hand into each path, and a profile language that talks about who you are instead of labeling what you want.
Tap a path to see what lives there. The umbrella stays the same on every screen — the modes are how a user expresses what kind of human they're looking for today. Romantic is one of four, never the default frame.
Each path inherits the same umbrella — "find your human" — but the surface, the matching signal, and the success metric all shift to fit it.
Right now MVP0's onboarding asks the user to take Apple-required compliance steps before it teaches them what kind of app they're standing inside. The May 8 reframe makes the journey itself part of the product. Tap a step.
The first room is the practice room. Vibe checks, prompts, the things you don't know about yourself yet.
Reciprocity reps. Read someone, be read. Match patterns, not faces.
Interest rooms, nearby, marketplace. The places connection happens that aren't romantic.
Romantic matching gates open. Not on signup — on readiness signals from steps 1–3.
Each onboarding step is illustrated, never form-first. The form fields are the second thing on the screen, after a single emotional sentence and a piece of art.
The recsys is multi-target. Each step trains a different ranking head — self-awareness, reciprocity, community fit, then partner readiness. Romance unlocks last by design.
The sequence — self → friends → community → someone — is the thesis, not a UI flourish. Engineering is multi-target, partner-matching is gated by readiness, success is "outcome quality" not "time on app."
Carrying the eevulv guardrail. Cormorant headline. Plus Jakarta body. No more than one form field above the fold. Apple-compliance copy lives in the footer of each screen, not the headline.
The MVP0 cream-on-cream swipe is the visual anchor of the redesign. We don't trade it for a Lex-style busy mosaic. We rebuild the rooms around it.
We don't surface labels (poly, bi, mono, dom, etc.) as identity tags. We surface them as isms — phrases the user opts into about how they actually move through love and connection. Tap an ism to feel the pattern.
Most dating apps ask you to declare. We ask you to describe. The romantic preference is captured (the recsys needs it) but it lives in the answer to a question like "what do you make room for in love?" — not in a structured drop-down.
The pull-quote that anchored this in the May 8 conversation:
The structured value still goes to the matching system. The user just never sees a tag with their identity stamped on it.
Hover the small grey text to see the structured field the recsys actually receives. The user only ever sees the sentence.
Two specific UI fixes from the May 8 conversation, both portable to MVP0 and load-bearing for MVP1.
A notification is interrupting reading content. It needs to look different from reading content — different color (already done), different position (currently left, should be center). The left-alignment pulls the eye into the body of the screen and the user keeps scrolling past the alert.
Reads like another paragraph. Eye glides past it.
Reads as different. Different intent, different position.
Lex's anti-pattern: a reply input that could be a public comment OR a private DM, and the user can't tell which. The May 8 quote: "I don't really want to say hi to this person because they're laughing at me. Hi. But is this many people that can see this post when I say hi?"
Every input has a one-line audience prefix above it. "Replying publicly to 14 people in this room" vs. "Sending privately to Maya." The prefix changes color to match the audience scope. Public uses gold; private uses ink.
A public reply and a DM are not the same widget with a toggle. They're two visually distinct affordances in two different places — public lives at the post, private lives in a separate intent action. No multi-tenancy switching. No Discord-style ambiguity.
The May 8 conversation had us walking through Lex screen by screen. Here's the receipt — what we copy, what we refuse, and why.
Six surfaces, four colors, three fonts on a single screen. Reads as "we threw everything at the wall." Ours stays editorial — one priority per screen.
The reply input that could go to one person or one hundred. We separate audiences with a labeled prefix and two distinct widgets.
The vertical-rail account switcher is the kind of "where do I touch?" that the May 8 conversation specifically named. We don't use it.
The orbiting-rings shapes that signal "an LLM made this." We draw our own SVGs for any AI-touched surface so it doesn't read as ChatGPT.
Proximity-based surfacing as a first-class verb. Becomes our "In the room" path — same idea, redrawn editorial.
Joinable category groups as a way to scale community without our team running events. Becomes our "Interest rooms" path.
The "this is what I'm here for" surface. We rebuild it as the isms vocabulary — sentences not labels.
Not from Lex — from Facebook. But the lesson is the same: features make the platform sticky, the platform doesn't make features sticky. Ours is sapphic-only and curated for what this community actually buys.
NYC Pride 2026 is brand activation, not the beta launch. Beta begins September. So the redesign forks into a "what we can ship before Pride" patch list and a "what MVP1 is" north star. Both are below.
Things we can do inside the existing Flutter + Firestore + Cloud Functions stack without a re-architecture. Scoped tight on purpose.
What lands on the Bazel monorepo + Python gRPC + Postgres stack Mike, Bhaskar, and Khizr are spinning up. Tracks PR#2's foundation.
Each of these comes from a direct call-out on May 8. They're the tests every screen has to pass before it ships.
"Women are naturally attracted to something pretty." The cream-on-cream swipe is the anchor. Editorial layout, Cormorant headlines, original SVGs. No flat one-pagers, no dark mode, no stock-icon libraries.
"If we're trying to retrain them how our app works, retrain them. Don't switch the pattern halfway through." A notification is centered everywhere or nowhere. A primary action is one color across the whole app.
The walkthrough is the product. Every new surface gets a one-screen explainer the first time the user sees it — what this is, why we ask, how their interaction trains the matching.
"Love" never lands as romantic by default. Order in copy: community → self → someone. Order in product mechanics: self → friends → community → someone. Romantic matching is a gate the user opens, not the front door.
No identity tags on profile. Sentence-level isms instead. The structured value goes to the recsys — the user only ever sees the sentence they wrote.
Pulled from the Canva brandkit on April 24. Chocolate brown is the brand ink — not the older burgundy. The cream + sand pair is the canvas. Blush, gold, and rose are accents, used sparingly.
Cormorant Garamond — display, headlines, brand marks.
Plus Jakarta Sans — body, UI, captions, CTAs.
Pure black ink (#000). Dark mode. Neon accents. Sans-serif-only stacks. Generic icon libraries. The "AI circle" aesthetic. Restyling "She & HER" — case stays.
Working list. Each item below has a named owner from the team.
"Sapphic, by design." (memory) vs. "Sapphic by Design" (eevulv April 21). Reconcile before any new surface ships. Owner: Desi × eevulv.
Not Discord. Sevanne to spec the in-app feedback surface for the September beta cohort.
Pull from the Folk "Pride 2026 — Brand Targets" and year-round ICP groups. Headspace, U-Haul, Anastasia all already warm.
What counts as "ready for romantic matching"? Mike + Sevanne to scope the gating heuristic for the recsys.
The 9 sentences in §03 are starter clay. Opportune (Bre + Lyric) to expand and stress-test in a working session.
Copy thread is open. Ship 2–3 screens before NYC Pride. Apple compliance lines stay below the fold.
This brief came out of a coffee-shop conversation between Sevanne and Desi on May 8, 2026 — the kind of meeting where the umbrella, the four paths, and the “who’s your human” reframe all landed in one sitting.
Everything in here is the receipt for that conversation. The pretty swipe stays. The walkthrough is the product. Romance is third.
Sevanne Calle · PM · Desirée Mayon · CEO and founder
