The Movie Has to Star Them

TL;DR

A speech therapist called Gentle Journeys an executive function tool, and it reshaped the whole product. The biggest update I've ever shipped is live starting today, and all of it serves one idea: the visuals only work when the person can see themselves in them.

It all started at a conference

Someone else had to tell me what my own app does.

Earlier this year I was working a table at an autism conference when a speech therapist stopped by. She had more than twenty-five years in this work, and she was hearing about Gentle Journeys for the first time. She interrupted me in the middle of my pitch and said, "This is executive function!"

Her enthusiasm had me excited even though I had no idea what she was talking about.

She told me I absolutely had to reach out to a colleague of hers, a well-known expert who has spent her career studying executive function. This ended up being the single most important conversation I had that day.

One Zoom call later

I reached out, and the expert was gracious enough to make time for me. Before you do a task on your own, she told me, you run a quick movie of yourself doing it. What the room will look like, what you'll look like in it, what done will look like. Most of us run that movie all day without noticing. When it doesn't start, you wait for someone else to tell you what comes next.

The movie has to star you. Show a person a cartoon or a stick figure doing the task and you've handed them a translation problem. Step one of the routine becomes figuring out who that person is.

Summertime

Finally having feedback and context from an expert in the field both solidified the direction Gentle Journeys was headed and confirmed how much further I needed to take it. Seeing yourself in the app was only step one. The movie gets stronger as it gets truer to real life, so the app had to show more of the person's world. The backyard, the classroom, the dog, the actual people in their day. Up to this point, it was still made-up scenery from nowhere.

So I did what any sane person would do. I rebuilt just about every part of the product, about 1,200 commits' worth (for non-nerds, just know this means I'm clearly not fun at parties). If you've used Gentle Journeys before, your next login is going to look and feel different.

See it with my own family

Gentle Journeys now takes personalization ten steps further and covers the person's whole world. Their parents, teachers, and friends. Their home, their classroom, their toys, their comfort objects, and yes, even their pets. Add them once and they show up in anything you make. Share a photo of a real place or a real thing during creation and the app keeps an approved illustrated version (as always, the photo itself gets deleted afterward).

You can see exactly what I mean in the image at the top of this post. On the left, real photos. My boys, my wife, me, our dog Bucky, and our actual backyard. On the right, the scenes Gentle Journeys made from them. The whole family, poolside, right down to the basketball hoop at the far end. That's what the app does now with anything you save to a person's world. A picture like that hands Carson nothing to translate. He knows that's his backyard and his family. Straight to executive function with no steps in between.

Everything else that shipped

The rebuild was also a chance to take the feedback I've received so far and reshape some key areas of the product.

Real editing. Go back and edit any part of your saved Journeys. Reorder, remove, or add steps and pages, describe what you want changed in a specific image, or simply ask the chat assistant to make the change for you, then approve what comes back.

Voices. More narration voices to choose from, and each profile in an account can have its own.

Calmer screens. Redesigned pages that are easier to get around, with the daily plan reading as a simple morning-to-evening timeline.

A memory. The assistant can recall details about a profile, so the next thing you make starts from what it already knows about them.

The real purpose

At the end of the day, everything above is one feature wearing different clothes. A person, seeing themselves getting through their day, and then going and doing it. If you've got a minute, log in and take it for a spin. And if something feels off, tell me.

If you're interested in learning more about how everything works, check out gentlejourneys.ai/how-it-works.