Kiefer Likens
All work

003 — Product · Application · Design System

Software that removes the reason people quit.

Client
Family Worship
Industry
Software — devotional application
Engagement
Built
Status
Live — v2.0
Role
Product Design, Art Direction, Design System
Stack
Next.js 16, Turbopack, Tailwind CSS, Authentication, Transactional email
Family Worship landing page: warm parchment ground with the headline ‘A structure for sacred habits’ set in a display serif.
Landing — the structure of a liturgy

02

Problem

Households do not abandon daily worship because they stopped believing in it. They abandon it because at seven in the morning, with three children and eleven minutes, nobody knows what to do first. The failure is not devotional, it is operational — and every existing answer was a book that assumed you had already solved the operational part.

03

Insight

Remove the planning and the habit survives. Everything in the product follows from that: the liturgy is pre-composed, it rotates daily against the liturgical calendar, and it is on one screen you read straight down. There is no builder, no template picker, no configuration step to abandon. Open it and begin.

04

Direction

Liturgical weight without the church-bulletin register. A display serif over a geometric sans, on warm parchment in light mode and a genuinely re-authored warm dark mode — not a gray inversion. No photography at all. Reading interfaces should be typography, spacing, and vertical order, and nothing else. Motion is a single seven-hundred-millisecond rise, used once.

05

Execution

Thirteen liturgy movements from the call to worship through to the Lord’s Prayer, in three complete modes — personal, family altar, and an evening prayer written for spouses — with an age-tiered variant for children under thirteen. Catechism tradition is selectable across Westminster, Heidelberg, and the 1689 Baptist confession, and the Bible layer spans several translations.

06

System

Family accounts where members inherit the household head’s preferences, streak tracking that survives time-zone changes, text-to-speech over the liturgy content, transactional email for invitations and digests, a user-configurable accent token threaded through the whole theme engine, and a documented accessibility pass covering keyboard navigation and screen readers.

07 — Evidence

Each figure is labeled with where it came from — observed in the build, published by the client, or published by a partner. Nothing here is an unsourced performance claim.

  • Liturgy movements

    13

    Observed in build

  • Worship modes

    3

    Observed in build

  • Catechism traditions

    Westminster / Heidelberg / 1689

    Observed in build

  • Price

    Free, permanently

    Observed in build

Free, permanently, with no tier and no upgrade path — stated on the landing page as a position rather than a launch promotion. There is consequently no revenue or conversion metric to report, and none is claimed. The changelog from v1.67 to v2.0.0 is the honest record of the work.

08 — Reflection

Reflection

The hardest decision was refusing to let it become a content platform. Every feature request wants to add a library, a plan builder, a community feed. All of them reintroduce the decision that kills the habit. The product is good because of what it will not do.