Mahou Learning

My own work sat on the interface side. I built the theming system the rest of the app reads its colours from, moved styling over to NativeWind, and built the home screen, the settings and cards screens, the Mahou companion screen with its hunger and happiness state, and the Kanji Memory minigame.

This was a team project. The stack above describes the whole app; the paragraph above describes the part I contributed.

Getting theme switching to hold across the whole app was the harder of the two. A theme is only real if every screen reads its colours from the same place. One hard-coded value and the app half-changes, which looks worse than not having themes at all. That is what the theme provider exists to prevent, and it meant going back through screens that already worked.

The other was the home page. It is the screen that has to earn attention in the first few seconds and give someone a reason to come back tomorrow, so what it leads with (the companion, progress, the way straight into a session) went through several passes before it felt right.

Everything I owned on Mahou was interface and experience work, and that is where the lessons are. Deciding what a learner sees first, keeping the app consistent from screen to screen, and making practice feel like something other than a chore did more for whether a session got finished than any single feature did.

It also taught me how much of UX is maintenance rather than invention: a theming system, a shared button, a screen layout that other people build on top of are all decisions that either hold up across a team or quietly come apart.