From a working app to the App Store in 7 days

I hadn’t researched the App Store page, and the flows were based on guesses, not on common standards. There were no users yet, so fixing it then only took a day. Fixing it after launch would take much longer. These were the three biggest fixes:

I tried three directions with the same screens and text. Page shows your words like a quiet sheet of paper. Instrument works like a recorder and shows every state. Stage is a block of colour that holds the most important thing on the screen. I chose Stage because it changes with each state, and on the result page the post sits on it like a real card.

The original blue felt cold and too close to the iOS system blue. I tried five colours, checked their contrast, and chose Plum. Purple often looks like “AI”, so I set some rules: no gradients or glow effects, the brand colour only on the stage, and all buttons in dark ink. I also changed the logo colour to match, but kept its shape.

At first, dark mode looked muddy. The greys were cold next to the warm purple, and the post cards were darker than the background, so they looked like holes. I added a little plum to every surface and made the cards lighter. After checking Apple’s design guidelines (HIG), I raised the contrast of small text from 3.20:1 to 4.81:1, and removed the logo from inside the app.

The image cards all looked the same. Each one was a line of text plus a decoration that had nothing to do with the post. My rule: every image has a main subject taken from the post, like a number, a comparison, a conversation, a list, a question or a quote.

Now Denlo chooses the scene and the words to highlight, and adds a handwritten note from your own words. It never shows a number you didn’t say, so the images can’t make up facts. Carousels now tell a story, with one line running across all the slides.

The first colour palettes were too loud. I kept four soft paper colours: Clay, Dusk, Sage and Paper. If the automatic choice is wrong, you can change it with one tap.

The app worked, but it felt flat. The only animation was a fade. I didn’t want to animate everything, so I added motion to three key moments. When Reduce Motion is on, they become simple fades.

The welcome page became an 11-second animation, Speak → Shape → Share, instead of paragraphs of text.

Onboarding asked people to choose topics, but every recording already says the topic. So I changed the first question to “What do you do?”. A founder and an engineer would write the same idea in different ways, and Denlo needs this later to learn how you post. Your role only changes the tone and the words. Denlo never writes “As a founder, I…” unless you said it.