Senior Product Designer turning digital products into brand experiences

FamilySearch
Making FamilySearch feel even more inviting to a younger generation
Concept project · Gamification, Visual language
Lexy
A language assistant that knows who you’re talking to
Product, designed and built · AI assistant, Brand

hi@robsonsevero.com

Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil

São Paulo time (UTC−3)

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FamilySearch
A concept exploring a Family Tree experience designed with younger users in mind.
Lexy
The motivation in Lexy starts with something real: saying what you actually need to say. Trying phrasings and reading explanations creates a loop of experimenting and getting feedback, what Octalysis calls Empowerment of Creativity and Feedback.
FamilySearch
This is a concept, so there’s no usage data yet. If it shipped, I’d track three things:
Lexy
The working title was Comment on dit (“how do you say it”). It described the task well, but nobody gets attached to a task. I renamed it Lexy: short, friendly and tied to language, a name you could actually grow fond of.
FamilySearch
My first instinct was a new logo. What actually made the product feel younger was expanding the identity FamilySearch already had and borrowing from something young people already love: games and game-like interfaces. The brand stays recognizable, and the experience becomes a lot more inviting.
FamilySearch
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I built the hollow square into a working interaction concept. Family cards, connection lines, selection states and controls all share the same language, so it still feels like FamilySearch, just more alive.
FamilySearch
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Remember that 3D tree from the early explorations? I developed it into Your Family Grove, where each glowing leaf is a relative. The tree’s size follows your family tree: a few relatives make a small tree, hundreds or thousands make a full canopy. The count is still there, but now it has a shape. You see your tree grow, not just a number go up.
FamilySearch
Watching the grove grow is one thing. Shaping it is another. The prototype lets you try different tree styles, change the time of day and add rain or snow, with every choice showing up instantly in the scene.
FamilySearch
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With the message in place, I looked for a visual language that could feel younger. I started with squares, a simple building block that could shape a new mark, the navigation icons, the family cards and even merch.
FamilySearch
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The squares kept pulling me toward a new logo. But the more I thought about FamilySearch as a global brand, the clearer it got that its mark was worth keeping. A younger audience didn’t need a different symbol. They needed the product to feel different.
Lexy
Saving and practicing now happen where you find the phrases, so the export routine is gone. As one of Lexy’s first users, I cancelled the paid flashcard membership I was keeping just to study them.
Lexy
Early versions ran on mock data. With real translations, an answer took more than 20 seconds, and switching to the Claude API only brought it down to 17. So I changed the order: the best phrasing streams in first and the alternatives follow one by one. The first phrase now shows up in about 4 to 5 seconds.
Lexy
When an answer is worth keeping, you pick up the phrase and drop it onto a deck in the sidebar. Saving becomes part of exploring, not a separate routine of copying, exporting and importing into another app.
Lexy
Opening a deck turns your saved phrases into flashcards. Each card starts with what you wanted to say, and flipping it reveals the French, with pronunciation, meaning and usage notes. In the recording, “Could you repeat that?” flips to its French answer before moving through the deck.
Lexy
You type what you want to say in your own language, and Lexy answers in French that fits the active context. In the recording, “I think this is perfect” becomes “Pour moi c’est nickel,” a casual way to say it in a design discussion, not a word-for-word translation.
Lexy
A phrase is more useful when you understand the choice behind it. Opening one shows a pronunciation guide, a literal back-translation and usage notes, plus an explanation tied to the active context.
Lexy
Lexy knows which language you think in, and that shapes its most distinctive feature. Portuguese and French are close enough to set traps: words that look the same but mean something else, and structures that feel natural but sound off. Take “pretender”: in Portuguese it means to intend, but the French “prétendre” means to claim.
Lexy
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Lexy doesn’t just translate a sentence. It looks at who you’re talking to, what you’re trying to say and how formal the moment is, then suggests French that fits.
FamilySearch
Find your family. Discover yourself. → Their story is yours
current
Before touching any screens, I wanted young people to see family history as something they’re part of and can help carry forward.