Tilda is a coordination tool for families managing an ageing parent's care from a distance, replacing scattered paper notes and chaotic group chats with one calm, shared view. The app serves two very different users on two very different screens: adult children who need speed and clarity between meetings, and ageing parents who need a simple, dignified way to see their own week. Positioning the parent view as the harder, defining problem is what will make the whole product trustworthy.
Overview & Goals
- Give the adult child a fast way to log appointments, medication, and who did what, without re-entering information already spoken about elsewhere
- Give the ageing parent an independent, read only view of today and tomorrow that requires no explanation and no help to use
- Make task handoffs between family members visible, so it is always clear whether something agreed was actually done
- Replace the paper notes and family chat group as the single place this information lives
Budget & Timeline
The first eight weeks are spent on the parent view and the four core flows, ending in a clickable prototype ready for testing with real families. From there, the same flows are extended into a full native screen set for iOS and Android, targeted for the end of the quarter and ready to hand to development.
Target Audience
Two distinct users share one product: the adult child coordinating care remotely, often in short bursts of attention, and the ageing parent who wants a stable, quiet answer to a simple question, what is happening today.
App & platforms
- Platforms
- iOS, Android
- Stage
- Concept, nothing built
- Core flows
- Add an appointment and see the week. Log that a medication was taken, by the parent or by anyone else. Hand a task to another family member and see whether it happened. A read-only view for the parent that shows today and tomorrow and nothing else. Onboarding for someone who has never been given an app by their daughter before.
- Constraints
- Accessibility requirement, Offline use, Native platform conventions
Style
Colour
Direction chosen
Soft & gentle
Pastels and low contrast. Approachable rather than loud.
Examples of the mood, not the colours anyone has to use.
In the client's own words
Tilda is an app for people looking after an ageing parent from a distance. Appointments, medication, who called the doctor last, what the neighbour agreed to do on Thursday. It does not exist yet, there is no code and no design, only twenty interviews with people doing this today on paper and in a family chat group. The two of us have funded six months. What makes it hard is that two very different people use it: a daughter in her forties on a phone between meetings, and her father in his eighties who should be able to see his own week without being managed.
Scope & Deliverables
- Synthesis of the twenty family interviews into design principles before any screens are drawn
- Information architecture covering both the adult child and parent experiences as one connected system
- Wireframe flows for adding appointments, logging medication, handing off tasks, and the parent's read only week
- Onboarding sequence designed for someone who has never been handed an app like this before
- Clickable prototype for testing with real families
- Accessibility specification covering contrast, text size, and gesture alternatives from the first draft, not a later pass
- Full native screen set for iOS and Android ready for the first build
- Offline behaviour defined for every core flow
Do's & Don'ts
Do
- Design the parent view first, since it is the harder problem and it sets the constraints for everything else
- Meet contrast and text size requirements from the first sketch, not as a compliance pass afterwards
- Read all twenty interviews before drawing anything, they are the only real material this project has
- Design native to each platform's conventions so both users feel at home on their own device
Don't
- Do not design one interface and simply scale up the type for the older user, that solves a different problem
- Do not hide any action behind a gesture that has no visible, obvious alternative
- Do not assume the parent's needs can be inferred later from the adult child's flows
- Do not let the soft, gentle palette drift into anything that reads as childish or clinical