An AI companion for dementia family caregivers, built for the moments they face alone.
Linda has just gotten her mother to sleep. For the fifth time today, Mom asked, "Where is my husband?" Each time, Linda didn't know how to answer — the truth would devastate her mother, a lie would devastate Linda. She picks up her phone, not wanting to bother anyone, looking for one thing: how do I answer this question?
Dementia caregivers don't only face care tasks. They face constant emotional pressure and an information vacuum. In the critical moments — when a mother asks repeatedly about someone who passed, when a father refuses to eat, when wandering happens — they need immediate, trustworthy answers, not a list of forty Google results to triage.
Existing resources are either too scattered or too gatekept. In the moments help is needed most, the caregiver is often alone.
Spouses and adult children. Aged 45–75. Moderate-to-low digital comfort. Living under sustained stress. Almost always unprepared for the sudden behavioral incidents dementia brings.
Daughter and primary caregiver
Catherine was built by a fully remote, early-stage team. As the only designer, I worked outside the rooms where most decisions formed.
I owned the sign-up/login flow and the chat interface wireframes. AI behavior, tone, and product strategy sat outside my scope.
Feedback was sparse. Decisions arrived as instructions, not conversations, and I delivered without asking what they were for.
What I'd build if I came back to this problem today — not as a chatbot, but as a companion that remembers, behaves with care, and earns its place in a caregiver's hardest hours.
Let users feel Catherine before asking them for anything. Sign-up becomes an upgrade — for memory, history, and continuity — not a gate.
"Try as guest" is the default path. Users experience a full Catherine interaction before any commitment is asked of them.
Once a user has felt the value, registration is invited with a clear "here's what you gain": memory, history, continuity.
Only ask for what is necessary. Phone, complex passwords, and marketing checkboxes are removed.
Many users arrive at 11 PM, mid-crisis. The flow assumes one hand, low attention, high stress — not a fresh desk and a coffee.
In an AI product, how it talks is the product. Tone and response structure aren't polish — they're the core of whether Catherine feels trustworthy at 11 PM.
Calm. Supportive. Non-judgmental. Never alarming, never instructive, never preachy. The voice meets the caregiver where they are — exhausted, uncertain, doing their best.
Every substantive answer follows the same five-part shape, so users learn what to expect:
When Linda types "She's asking about Dad again," Catherine's response draws on what it remembers: Mom's name is Sarah. Mom no longer remembers Dad passed in 2019. This question has come up before. The design question: how does the UI signal that memory is in use, without breaking the conversation?
Memory should be discoverable, not shouted. A subtle underline or dot — not a banner or callout.
When you see Catherine using a memory, you can tap it there to view or edit — no settings-page archaeology.
Catherine never announces "I remember X." Memory only surfaces when it's naturally being used in a response.
No "Catherine knows 47 facts about your mom" metrics. That's both surveillance-y and reductive.
Back then, design decisions arrived without rationale, and I executed without questioning what I might have asked. I didn't realize that pushing for the "why" — even in writing, even unanswered — was part of my job, not a luxury reserved for senior designers.
In some sense, this case study is those questions, asked years late.
In high-stakes contexts, retention and DAU will mislead you. Solve "do users dare to trust this?" before "how often do users come back?" Engagement metrics are downstream of trust — never the other way around.
Always begin from a specific user moment — with time, place, and emotional context — not an abstract feature description like "an AI assistant for X." If you can't picture the moment, you can't design for it.