Ux

I had a problem. My dad had dementia. He couldn’t remember if he’d taken his pills. He couldn’t remember what day it was. He couldn’t reliably use the phone he’d been using for a decade. I looked at the App Store. I found 47 medication reminder apps. Every single one of them had: user accounts, push notification permissions, onboarding flows, settings screens, cloud sync, subscription upsells. Not one of them was: open the app, tap green when you’ve taken your pill, done. So I built Buddy. And I kept running into the same reaction from everyone I showed it to: “why doesn’t this already exist?” That’s the question behind this post. ...

My dad called me at 2 AM. “I can’t find my medication,” he said. “I don’t know what day it is.” He was 76. He had dementia — early stage, we thought, until it wasn’t. What he actually had was a UTI that no one had caught, accelerating everything. But at 2 AM, I didn’t know that. I just knew he was confused, scared, and alone in his apartment 400 miles away. I drove up that morning. Sat with him. Watched him stare at his phone like it was a foreign object — which, in a sense, it was. Small text. Too many apps. Notifications everywhere. He’d been using it for 10 years and suddenly it might as well have been written in hieroglyphics. That’s when I started building Buddy. ...