Dex Companion answers the question and gets out of the way.

The problem is friction, not information

All of this information already exists. The trouble is the retrieval: you're mid-battle on the sofa, you need to know what a type is weak to, and getting the answer means leaving the game, opening a browser, loading a page heavy with ads, and scrolling past a preamble to reach a table. By the time you're back you've lost the thread of what you were doing.

With three kids playing at once, that friction multiplies. Somebody is always asking someone else to look something up.

So the design target isn't engagement. It's time-to-answer. Open, search, read, close — reachable one-handed, fast enough to use without pausing the conversation.

The interface

Structural diagrams of the layouts, not screenshots. Real captures will replace these when the interface settles.

How it's built

Deliberately unmotivating

There's a gamification framework called Octalysis, from Yu-kai Chou, that maps human motivation onto eight core drives and splits them into two halves. White Hat drives — meaning, accomplishment, creative feedback — leave people feeling capable. Black Hat drives — scarcity, unpredictability, fear of loss — produce far more immediate action and leave people feeling anxious.

A companion app is an unusual case, because the game it accompanies is already running a very effective Black Hat engine. Collecting rare things, random encounters, the pull of the next one — that's the whole appeal, and it works. It isn't my business to add a second layer of it.

So Dex Companion has no daily anything. No notifications, no streaks, no reason to open it except that you have a question. Collection progress exists because tracking what you've caught is genuinely useful, and it's presented as a plain record rather than a bar that nags you toward completion.

The app should be forgettable when you're not playing. That's the goal, not a compromise.

Questions I'd ask