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Behind the Scenes
Things that don't show up in the product but are part of how it was made.
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This ASCII pic can be found at
https://asciiart.website/art/6708
The original idea was simple: build something educational for people who don't like cats. Teach, inform, demystify.
Partway through, it became clear that education alone doesn't transform anyone. People need to become part of the action, not just consume information — and for that, they need to connect with people already part of it: the caretakers, the protectors, the people already on duty.
That's when the product became something else: a community. And with it came a cycle that makes sense on its own:
knowledge → action → community → more knowledge
Whoever learns, acts. Whoever acts, meets other people. Whoever meets other people, wants to learn more. The cycle sustains itself.
Yes. Gatopolis was on the list.
The idea was decent — cat city, something big, urban, communal. But it quickly became clear it read too much like a game — Metropolis, CityVille, that vibe. Not what the product is.
Felines won because it's neutral, plural — and because it works in English without needing translation. A small decision, but one that keeps a future international expansion open.
If you used Microsoft Word in the 2000s, you probably remember Clippy — the animated paperclip assistant that popped up in the corner with tips (not always useful, but always there).
Felines' cat assistant was born from that memory: an animated character that appears contextually, at specific moments in the user's journey, with a relevant message — and then leaves.
Except instead of an office paperclip, it's a tabby cat that walks up to the camera, blinks, and walks away. Much better.
That's genuinely true. When Felines started, the founder didn't know what a cat colony was.
She has a dog, loves animals, even started an Ecology degree — but cat colony, caretaker, TNR, the vacuum effect? All new.
That turned out to be one of the best things that could have happened. Every UX decision was filtered through someone who genuinely didn't understand this world. If a piece of information didn't land, it had to be rewritten. If a flow was confusing, it had to be rethought.
Felines' palette wasn't picked from a color generator or a design trend. It was pulled from the two most common street-cat colorings in Brazil: the caramel cat and the tabby cat.
These are the colors every Brazilian recognizes when they think
of a street cat. From them came the logo cat — and from the logo
cat came the entire palette. The orange-brown (#B66119), the
golds and ochres derived from it — all of it came from the fur.
The product and the character share the same chromatic identity
because they're the same thing: two ways of saying who Felines is.
Recording the product demo video turned into its own testing pass. Walking through the product on camera, as a real visitor would, surfaced a handful of bugs that every earlier audit had missed — some got fixed on the spot, others are noted for the next round. It was a good reminder that a product is never really "done" being tested: there's always one more real, unscripted flow that finds something new. Felines is, and will keep being, a product in motion.
Building Felines this way — messy, hands-on, wearing every hat at once — was genuinely fun. I was the UX designer, the developer, and the QA all in the same afternoon: writing a flow, breaking it, fixing it, then handing my phone to a friend and watching them get confused by something I was sure was obvious. That's real user testing — no formal panel, just people I know actually clicking through the map and telling me, out loud, what didn't make sense.
I made mistakes constantly, and learned something from almost every one of them — about cats, about colonies, about how people who've never thought about any of this actually react to it. This project reminded me why I got into this field in the first place: it's fun. Building something end to end, watching real people use it, fixing what's broken, and doing it again — that's the part of tech that made me fall in love with it.