DandyLine — Onboarding Intro Flow

01

Why this flow exists

▶

A Gardener opens DandyLine for the first time. Within sixty seconds they need to understand: what is this, why would I use it, is my stuff safe, and does it cost me anything? If those four answers don't land, they don't plant. If they don't plant, the product never starts.

The intro flow's job is to deliver those four answers in a tone that feels like DandyLine — patient, quiet, never pushy — and to invite the next step without demanding it. Five slides. Three breaths each. A way out at every step.

What the intro deliberately avoids

Feature parade. No "Here are the 12 things DandyLine can do." The product reveals itself through use.
Sentimentality. No Hallmark copy. No "share life's most precious moments." The brand voice is grounded.
Urgency. No countdown timers, no "Only X spots left," no FOMO mechanics. The intro mirrors the product — patient by design.
Journaling framing. Critical: DandyLine is NOT a journaling app. Journaling is a vein, not the headline. Time-as-medium is the headline.

Brief locked · 2026-05-02

02

Slide 1 · Welcome

▶

Skip

DandyLine

✿

A quiet place for memories that bloom in time.

Welcome.

Copy (drafted)

Headline: A quiet place for memories that bloom in time.

Body: Welcome.

Visual concept

A breathing dandelion mark at center — uses the canonical brand-icon.js renderer, ambient pulse animation. No floating seeds yet (those reveal in the next slide).

Interaction

Skip pill (top-right) is always visible — exits onboarding to the sign-in screen. Swipe left or tap Continue to advance. Progress dots at bottom show position.

Why this slide

Sets the tone in one breath. No feature pitch. No urgency. Just an invitation to stay another moment.

03

Slide 2 · Time is the medium

▶

Skip

How it works

→ →

Plant a memory. Let time deliver it.

DandyLine isn't a journal. It's not social. It's a place where you plant something — a photo, a note, a voice — and let time carry it forward to the moment it's meant for.

Copy (drafted)

Headline: Plant a memory. Let time deliver it.

Body: DandyLine isn't a journal. It's not social. It's a place where you plant something — a photo, a note, a voice — and let time carry it forward to the moment it's meant for.

Visual concept

A single Seed traveling forward across a horizontal time-arc. Soft trail behind it, gentle gold glow. The Seed slowly fades into the right edge as if continuing past the frame. Animation loops every 4–5 seconds.

Why this slide

This is the hardest slide to write. It has to dispatch the journaling mental model without explaining too hard. Three short sentences. The em-dash list ("a photo, a note, a voice") shows scope without itemizing features.

Copy decision

"To the moment it's meant for" vs. "to the person it was made for" — first reads more poetic and abstract, second reads more concrete. Lean: first, since DandyLine is also for sending to your future self (no second person required). Confirm.

04

Slide 3 · Sealed. Private. Yours.

▶

Skip

Privacy

⌂

Sealed. Private. Yours.

Once a Seed is sealed, no one — not even us — can open it until it's time. Nothing degrades. Nothing leaks. Your memories don't pay rent.

Copy (drafted)

Headline: Sealed. Private. Yours.

Body: Once a Seed is sealed, no one — not even us — can open it until it's time. Nothing degrades. Nothing leaks. Your memories don't pay rent.

Visual concept

A small sealed-jar mark with a steady ambient glow (sage-green tonal). Gentle pulse, no countdown ticker, no clock — sealing is calm, not urgent.

Why this slide

Trust is the unlock for everything else. Three short sentences cover the three real worries: privacy ("no one can open it"), data integrity ("nothing degrades"), and ownership ("your memories don't pay rent" — quietly addresses the "do I lose my stuff if I stop paying?" anxiety without spelling it out).

Copy alignment

"Not even us" needs to align with the locked Section M language in QUESTIONS-FROM-ASHLEY.md — DandyLine does ONE quiet check before encryption. "Not even us" is true after sealing, but a Gardener reading this must already understand we're not zero-knowledge in the strictest sense. The fuller framing lives in the Privacy page; this slide is the trust signal, not the legal disclosure. Lean: keep as-is. Confirm.

05

Slide 4 · DandyLine is free.

▶

Skip

Cost

∞

DandyLine is free.

Plant memories at no cost. What you preserve today stays preserved — for free, for as long as it needs.

Pro features will arrive later. The garden you start now is yours.

Copy (drafted)

Headline: DandyLine is free.

Body: Plant memories at no cost. What you preserve today stays preserved — for free, for as long as it needs.

Italic tease: Pro features will arrive later. The garden you start now is yours.

Visual concept

An infinity-style glyph or gentle continuous loop animation. Faded "View Pro Features" pill below could appear here as the future-tease (or save for the Gardener Menu, since they haven't seen the menu yet — maybe redundant).

Why this slide

This is the slide that prevents the "what's the catch?" pause. Critical for closed-beta and early adoption: a Gardener should never hesitate to plant their first Seed because they're worried about future paywalls on existing memories.

Storage cap interaction

"For as long as it needs" is honest only up to the storage cap (not yet defined — see Section M Josh consult). Once Josh weighs in and we have a free-tier cap, this copy may need a small clarifier or footnote. Or the slide could quietly mention the cap. Decide after Josh's input lands.

06

Slide 5 · Plant your first Seed.

▶

Begin

✿

Plant your first Seed.

Start small. A photo, a note, a voice. Pick when it should bloom. Pick who it's for. We'll handle the waiting.

Copy (drafted)

Headline: Plant your first Seed.

Body: Start small. A photo, a note, a voice. Pick when it should bloom. Pick who it's for. We'll handle the waiting.

CTA: Begin

Visual concept

The canonical dandelion mark, fully realized — with floating Seeds animating outward. This is the moment that previews the actual product visual the Gardener is about to enter. Bigger and brighter than slide 1's breathing mark.

Interaction

Skip pill is removed on this slide — a Gardener who reaches the end should be able to commit cleanly. The Begin button advances to the sign-in / sign-up screen (Row #6 of the build roadmap).

Why this slide

Sets up the planting ritual without explaining it. The four short imperatives ("Start small. A photo, a note, a voice. Pick when it should bloom. Pick who it's for.") preview the structure of the planting flow itself. The closer — "We'll handle the waiting" — gives the Gardener permission to forget about it after planting.

07

Dots, transitions & motion

▶

Progress dots

Five dots, centered, above the CTA. Active dot is gold (#D4A853), inactive dots are rgba(245,240,232,.18). The active dot has a subtle ambient pulse (1.4s cycle) — so the Gardener feels the page is alive even while standing still on a slide. Inactive dots are quiet.

Transitions

Slides advance via swipe-left or tap-Continue. Transition: a 380ms ease-out slide-and-fade — outgoing slide drifts left and dims; incoming slide drifts up from below at 92% opacity to 100%. No sharp cuts, no bounce. Matches the brand's organic motion principles.

The dandelion across slides

Slide 1 has the breathing mark (small, ambient). Slide 5 has the full canonical dandelion with floating Seeds (the same animation used in product-vaults.html). Slides 2–4 use other quiet visual placeholders that share tonal language with the dandelion (gold radial glows). The dandelion bookends the intro — it's the first DandyLine thing a Gardener sees, and it's the last thing they see before the Plant flow.

Skip behavior

Skip pill is present on slides 1–4, removed on slide 5. Tapping Skip exits the intro and routes directly to the sign-in / sign-up screen. The intro can be re-entered later from the Gardener Menu (helpful for users who skipped on first launch and circle back).

08

What this flow doesn't do

▶

The intro is deliberately scoped. The following live in other flows on purpose:

Sign-in / sign-up happens AFTER the intro, on tap of Begin. Lives in its own screen (Row #6 of the build roadmap).
Permissions (photos, location, notifications) happen AFTER sign-up, framed as choices not asks (Row #5 of the build roadmap).
Persona / intent question ("what describes you best") happens after sign-up, before first Plant (Row #5).
The animated dandelion as account-creation moment appears after sign-up confirms — same canonical mark, doubling as a loading beat. Spec'd in the Moleskine intake notes; will be built alongside the sign-in flow.
Privacy Policy + ToS are linked from the sign-up screen and the Gardener Menu — not surfaced in the intro slides themselves.

Keeping the intro narrow (5 slides, ≤ 60 seconds) preserves its job as tone-setter. The minute the intro starts asking for permissions or pushing decisions, it stops being an intro.

09

Invited-contributor branch (flagged, not built)

▶

From the Moleskine intake: someone who arrives via a Vault invite (tapped a Seed Key link) shouldn't be forced through the full 5-slide intro before they can contribute. Their entry mental model is different — they're not exploring DandyLine, they're showing up for someone they know.

The lightweight invited-contributor path is documented separately and will live in a different file (ux-invited-contributor-flow.html). The intro flow's only obligation is to know it has a sibling — when an invite link is detected at first launch, the app routes to the contributor branch instead of the standard 5-slide intro.

Routing logic

How is “arrived via invite” detected? Likely a query param or stored Seed Key on the landing route. Spec belongs in the contributor flow file, not here. Flagging for cross-link.

10

Open Questions

▶

① Slide-2 Copy Choice

"To the moment it's meant for" (poetic, abstract, includes future-self) vs. "To the person it was made for" (concrete, second-person). Lean: first.

② Slide-3 Trust Language

"Not even us" — confirm this aligns with the locked privacy framing. The full "one quiet check" framing lives on the Privacy page; this slide is a trust signal, not legal disclosure.

③ Slide-4 Pro Tease

Where does the faded "View Pro Features" tease live? Inside slide 4, or save for the Gardener Menu where the Pro button already lives as "Coming Soon"? Lean: skip the in-slide tease — the menu carries it. Slide 4's job is the free promise, not the upsell.

④ Storage Cap Disclosure

How much do we say about the free-tier cap on slide 4? Honest answer is "for as long as it needs, up to N GB." But N isn't locked yet (Josh consult, Section M). Decide after Josh's number lands.

⑤ Skip Re-Entry Path

Where does a Gardener re-enter the intro after skipping? Likely the Gardener Menu → FAQ & User Guide section. Confirm during Gardener Menu build (Row #7).

⑥ Slide Count

5 slides, or could we cut to 4? Slides 1 + 2 might collapse into one (welcome + time-as-medium), since slide 1 is currently almost empty. Lean: keep 5 — the "breath" of slide 1 lets the time-as-medium message land without crowding it. Confirm once Ashley test-walks through the copy.

⑦ Localization Hooks

Will copy be locked in English-only for MVP, or do we structure the slides to swap copy by locale? Lean: English-only for closed beta. Mark slide copy as a single-source string set so localization is a future swap, not a re-design.

⑧ Interactive Prototype

Build the swipeable phone-frame prototype next? Once copy is locked from this concept doc, the prototype is a focused build — phone frame, slide containers, swipe handler, transition timing. ~600 lines on its own. Separate session.

11

Brand voice guardrails

▶

Every line in the intro is brand voice. Use the locked vocabulary. Avoid the prohibitions. Reference brand-guide.html Ritual Vocabulary section for the canonical list.

Words used in the intro (all on-brand)

Plant, Seed, Bloom, Sealed — ritual verbs
Memory, Garden — quiet nouns
Time, the moment — the medium

Words explicitly NOT used in the intro

Upload, post, share, save, store, file, folder, content, media — generic productivity vocabulary
Journal, journaling — wrong mental model (journaling is a vein, not the headline)
Platform, social, community — DandyLine isn't social; intro must signal that without saying it
Memories you'll cherish, life's most precious — Hallmark voice

Tone test: Read each slide aloud at half volume, like you're reading a poem to a sleeping room. If a line feels like it could fit in an Apple Notes onboarding flow or a Notion intro tour, it's wrong. The brand voice is closer to a quiet letter than a startup pitch.