A notes app that isn't a notes app. Designed for CALD family violence survivors in Victoria who needed information about safety services — without leaving a trace.
The brief had a constraint that shaped every single design decision: the abuser might pick up the phone.
A standard resource app — with a name like "Safety Services" or "Family Violence Support" — would put survivors at risk the moment it was discovered. The screen could be seen across a room. A notification could arrive at the wrong moment. A browser history entry could escalate a dangerous situation.
So the design question was never "how do we build a resource directory." It was: how do we build something that looks unremarkable to the wrong person, and immediately useful to the right one?
The camouflage is not a visual choice. It is a safety feature.
The strategic frame
Nara is designed for CALD (culturally and linguistically diverse) survivors of family violence in Victoria — a population with compounding barriers to accessing help. English may be a second, third, or absent language. Services are often described in bureaucratic language that doesn't translate well. And the digital tools that exist tend to be built for an assumed user who speaks English, lives alone, and can safely browse a government website.
Most survivors in this cohort are not in those conditions.
The strategy was to solve for the most constrained scenario first: a woman sharing a device with her abuser, whose first language is Somali or Vietnamese or Arabic, who has minutes — not hours — to find information, and who cannot afford to have that search discovered.
If the design worked for her, it would work for everyone.
The design process
The first prototype was a standard resource directory — category pages, service listings, a search bar. It was competent and completely wrong. It looked like a tool for finding help. Which meant it looked like a problem, if found.
The pivot came from a single question asked during a review session with a practitioner who works directly with survivors: "If her partner opened this app right now, what would he see?"
The answer had to be: nothing unusual. A grocery list. A to-do list. Something so mundane it warranted no further inspection.
That question restructured the entire product. The UI became a notes interface. The language selector became the primary navigation — choose your language, and the "notes" are actually a curated list of local services, hotlines, and safety planning resources. The content is real. The container is camouflage.
What was deliberately left out
The most important design decisions in Nara are the ones that don't exist in the product.
- Direct messaging with a case manager Creates legal and duty-of-care obligations for practitioners who may receive a message outside working hours. A survivor sending "I'm in danger" and receiving no reply is worse than no feature at all.
- Push notifications A notification arriving on a shared device while the abuser is present could directly escalate danger. No notifications of any kind, ever.
- User accounts and login Account creation leaves a digital footprint — browser autofill, email confirmation, app store purchase history. Nara requires no account. There is nothing to find.
- Panic button or emergency UI A large red button labelled "Emergency" defeats the camouflage entirely. The 1800 RESPECT number is embedded in the content, presented as a plain note item — not a feature.
- Analytics and usage tracking Any data collected about user behaviour could potentially be accessed through legal processes, subpoenas, or data breaches. The app collects nothing beyond the language selection in the session.
- Social sharing or "tell a friend" A survivor sharing the app creates a discoverable record of the interaction. The app spreads through word of mouth and practitioner referral — not in-app virality.
Every "no" in this list is a safety decision, not a scope decision. The restraint is the design.
The interface
Visually, Nara is as unremarkable as possible. Dark background, minimal chrome, no iconography that signals crisis or support. The language selector sits at the top — the only navigation that exists. Select your language, and the notes restructure to show a curated list of Victorian services, contact numbers, and plain-language safety planning content in that language.
The content is static. It does not sync, it does not personalise, it does not require a connection after the initial load. This was also a deliberate choice — a survivor in a remote area, or one whose data usage is monitored, should be able to access the information without a live connection.
What the research showed
Work with practitioners in the family violence sector in Victoria surfaced a consistent theme: survivors from CALD backgrounds are underserved not because services don't exist, but because the information about those services isn't accessible in a form they can safely use.
The 1800 RESPECT number is nationally recognised — but a survivor who doesn't speak English, using a shared device, in a household where phone records are checked, faces a different set of constraints than the person that service was designed for.
Nara doesn't solve the system-level problem. It does one thing: it puts accurate, local, multilingual service information somewhere a survivor can access it without leaving a trace of having done so.