← Projects

ESD Open House

iOS campus guide used by families at the December 2025 open house.

Dec 2025 · iOS · Completed personal project

ESD Open House before-and-after overview showing original app screens beside the finished 'Your Open House Personal Guide' design
Before and after: the original flow beside the finished Open House guide design.

Stack

Stack: React Native · Expo · Supabase · Gemini · Antigravity

One real test window: the actual open house. The app had to be rehearsable with a fake clock, readable while walking, and useful before anyone understood the campus.

Log

  1. First cut

    The first build was deliberately plain. The Home tab opened with 'Welcome to ESD Open House,' a single Up Next card, and a short itinerary underneath. The important part was already there: if a parent looked down for three seconds, they could see the current event, time, place, and Guide Me There button.

    Original ESD Open House iPhone home screen showing a teal HAPPENING NOW card for Check-In and Welcome, a Guide Me There button, and a simple itinerary timeline below
    First cut. Plain, but the core product was visible: what is happening now?

  2. The day-of lesson

    Families used the app at ESD's actual Open House on December 7, 2025, and I heard that they appreciated it. The schedule mattered. The map mattered. But on the actual walk up, the now-card was the app: it surfaced the current event and time, while event details showed speakers, activities, and opportunities. Everything else was reassurance for the person already moving.

  3. Antigravity, useful and not

    I used Antigravity to rebase the event dates so the app could be tested before the real Sunday. It handled the schedule swap cleanly, then got tangled when I asked it to fix the fake-time harness too. The screenshot tells the whole day: schedule.ts updated, TimeProvider and DevTimeSlider half-edited, Expo running, Android SDK warnings, and the agent terminating before the time-machine path was actually clean.

    Google Antigravity IDE showing the Open House React Native project, schedule.ts and TimeProvider.tsx open, Expo terminal logs, and an agent panel describing event date updates before an agent terminated error
    Antigravity was good at the broad date swap and brittle inside the fake-clock chain.

  4. Finished design

    The finished design made the same product feel more like ESD. The blue serif headings, lighter cards, yellow status pill, larger navigation button, and campus map turned the original utility flow into an open-house guide.

    Finished ESD Open House app design shown across three iPhone screens: home, Chapel Service event details with speakers, and Campus Guide navigation
    The finished design: home, event details, and guided campus navigation.

  5. Campus guide

    The map view became the clearest visual upgrade. A circular satellite cutout kept the campus recognizable, red pins marked destinations, the blue dot marked the visitor, and the button copy stayed simple: Guide me.

    Final Campus Guide iPhone screen with a circular satellite map of the ESD campus, red location pins, a blue current-location dot, and a dark blue Guide me button
    Campus Guide, redesigned: fewer controls, clearer next action.

Result

One answer for visiting families: what now, and where next.

What I learned

The open-house app worked because it respected the moment: families did not need a portal, they needed a next step. The first cut found the center of gravity with the now-card; the finished design made that same idea feel more like ESD; Antigravity helped with broad repo edits but still struggled when the change required understanding time, simulation, and Expo all at once. The product lesson was simple: make the current event impossible to miss, then make the next location one tap away.

Related