Installation guide

Notes

Designing a 20-second
ritual for the workday

The hardest design question was not what to add to Tariela. It was what to leave out so a daily check-in could survive an actual workday.

Start with the smallest useful unit

Most horoscope and Tarot products assume a visitor has a few unhurried minutes: a full page to scroll, a quiz to answer, a feed to browse. Tariela started from the opposite constraint — what is the smallest version of this that still tells someone something real about their day? The answer became one glance at the current planetary hour, one short daily reading, and three cards that do not require an essay to reveal. Everything else had to justify its place against that twenty-second baseline.

What had to be cut

A forced onboarding quiz, a mandatory daily streak, a feed of yesterday's readings to scroll back through — all of it got cut, not because none of it would interest anyone, but because a workday does not have room for a product that asks to be attended to. The main screen opens without a sign-in gate for exactly this reason: the shortest path to the day's actual content should not run through a login form.

Tariela orb

The test for every feature was the same question: does this still work if someone only has twenty seconds today?

Depth stays, but it is optional

Cutting for speed did not mean cutting for shallowness. The moon phase opens into the real computed sky behind the day's reading; a Tarot question can go as deep as it needs to. The design principle was to keep depth available on request and keep nothing mandatory before the first useful glance. A person who wants twenty seconds gets twenty seconds; a person who wants more can tap further in.

Try the twenty seconds
for yourself

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Installation guide