*The Front Door to Everything*
Version: 0.1 MVP Draft
Date: 2026-03-23
Status: Design Complete — Ready for Engineering Review
*"I don't want to be forgotten. I just want someone to know I was here."*
— Every person who ever lived
Table of Contents
1. The Vision
2. Governing Principles
3. Onboarding Flow
4. The Globe Interface
5. LifeLine Builder
6. Family Tree
7. End-of-Life Guidance
8. Virtual Persona
9. Accessibility
10. Privacy & Sharing Controls
11. Emotional Design
12. Technical Stack
13. MVP Scope — 3-Month Build
14. What Gets Cut for v1
15. Open Questions
The Vision
Headstone is a digital legacy platform built on a radical premise: every human life is worth remembering in full.
Not just the famous. Not just the wealthy. Not just the digitally literate.
The grandmother who came over on a boat with nothing but a single photo and a recipe for bread. The veteran who never talked about it. The teenager who died too young. The migrant worker whose children only know him through stories. Every single one.
Headstone gives each person — regardless of age, ability, technology comfort, language, or resources — the tools to build a living record of their existence: where they went, what they felt, who they loved, what they believed, and what they want to leave behind.
It is not a social network. It is not a genealogy database. It is not a funeral service.
It is a sovereign record of a human life, owned entirely by that person, persistent beyond death, accessible on their terms.
Headstone has two equal primary interfaces — two lenses into the same life:
The Globe — the world view. Every life is a journey across the planet across time. Watch generations migrate. Zoom from the cosmic view of human history down to the street corner where your grandfather proposed to your grandmother. Geography, connection, the bigger picture.
The LifeLine — the personal view. Your story in sequence, from first moment to last. Linear because life is linear. More intuitive for most people — because we experience our own lives as a thread, not a map. Events, places, people, in the order they happened.
Neither is subordinate. They are complementary entry points into the same data. Some people will live in the Globe. Others will live in the LifeLine. Both are home.
And when data is missing — as it always is for the poor, the colonized, the forgotten — Headstone fills the gaps with tasteful, clearly-labeled reconstruction, and invites family to add what they know.
Governing Principles
These are non-negotiable. They inform every design decision.
1. Freedom
The user owns their data. Completely. Always. They can export it in full, at any time, in open formats. No lock-in. If Headstone the company ceases to exist, the data lives on.
2. Individual Rights
No one — not Headstone, not governments, not family members — can access, modify, or delete a person's record without their explicit consent. This includes posthumous access, which the person defines in advance.
3. Equality
This app must work for an 80-year-old in rural Mississippi with a $50 Android phone and spotty cell service. It must work for someone who cannot read. It must work for someone whose hands shake. It must work for someone who speaks Tagalog, Swahili, Haitian Creole. No one is a second-class user.
4. Dignity
Every interaction treats the user's life, memories, and wishes as sacred. We never rush them. We never exploit their grief.
Your data is a product — it always has been. The difference is that until now, someone else owned it, valued it, and kept the proceeds. Headstone changes that. You self-certify its value. You decide who accesses it and under what conditions. You choose who benefits — your family, your causes, humanity at large.
This is not exploitation. This is ownership. The point is not to make you feel like a milk cow. The point is to make you the farmer.
5. Resilience
The system is designed to survive. Records should be exportable to open formats, storable locally, shareable via physical media (USB, QR code packages), and optionally mirrored to personal cloud storage or peer-to-peer networks.
Onboarding Flow
Philosophy
The onboarding must feel like a conversation with a kind, unhurried stranger — not a signup form. It adapts in real-time to who the person is and what they need. It never overwhelms. It asks one question at a time.
The first question is not "What's your email?" The first question is:
**"What would you like to do today?"**
Three simple choices appear, large and clear:
📖 Tell my story 🌳 Connect with family 🕊️ Plan for the future
Each path has different onboarding — a person who wants to plan their estate sees different first steps than someone just wanting to upload old photos. But they end up in the same place.
Full Conversational Onboarding Flow
Mode Selection (shown before any account creation):
The app presents itself first. Before any prompt, before any account creation — the home screen is the experience. It is also the primary interactive menu: everything visible is clickable.
Home Screen — Visual Spec
The scene:
- Deep space background. Stars drift slowly, perpetually — gentle, never distracting. The cosmos is always present.
- At center: a living globe, slowly rotating. Beautiful, photorealistic or stylized (TBD). The planet itself is clickable and zoomable — tap to explore geography, pinch to zoom to street level.
- Through the globe's equator runs the LifeLine — a glowing thread cutting through the center of the Earth like an equatorial band. Clickable and zoomable: tap to enter the linear timeline view of a life.
- To the left and right of the globe: two heartbeat pulses, slowly animating. The left pulse is slightly larger. The right is slightly smaller. Both pulse slowly — the right pulse just perceptibly weaker than the left. A quiet nod to temporality. We are all moving in one direction.
- Behind and around everything: the Tree of Life — visible, present, clickable. Tap to enter the ancestry and family tree view.
The Headstone:
- The cross traditionally found on a headstone is replaced by a Golden Key 🗝️ — symbolizing value, access, ownership. The key to your own legacy.
If the person has passed:
- Gently radiating concentric rings — Ripples — spread outward from the center of the globe. Slow, uniform, liquid. Like a stone dropped in still water, but never stopping. Barely visible, like the stars themselves. A permanent, beautiful signal that this life has completed its arc and its resonance continues.
If a Virtual Avatar has been enabled (The Quickened):
- A portrait or image of the person appears — placed artfully within the scene according to the wishes and tastes of the individual (or their designated custodian). Clickable. The placement is personal, not templated.
Interaction summary:
This page summarizes the full specification. See the full document for complete details.