Dealing with my Phone Addiction
Designing a couple of interactions to deal with technology addiction and attention deficits using the idea of attention as a resource.
Challenge
For this project, I was tasked to create a handful of interactions which dealt with a context relevant to technology addiction and attention deficits. I was expected to create two Hi-Fidelity mockups of interactions we select from the multiple ideas sketched.
Duration : 12 Days
Role : Interaction Designer
My Role: This was a solo project.
Solution 1 : The Second Bubble
Adding a “notification” bubble on the left side of apps to give users subtle reminders of how much they are using the app/ how much time they have left.
Allowing users to set their limits.
Users have get to modify the amount of time they want to spend on the apps with a reminder of their current usage.
Whether the apps need to be locked
Letting the users decide if they’d like to get locked out of apps if they go over the time they set for it.
How it works?
The “second bubble” shows progress on how the user is doing with the time limit user sets for themselves as the progress circle shrinks and turns red.
Once the have exhausted their time on the app, either the app gets locked if they have chosen to do so or the bubble shows how much over the time they went.
Solution 2 : Roadrunner Time away from Screen
Gamifying the experience of not unlocking the phone for extended periods of time.
Wake up interaction and recent milestone
The interaction goes into action on the lock screen when the user taps awake the phone or picks it up. The first thing user sees is the most recent milestone they hit.
Running off the ledge starts it over
If the user decided to unlock the phone, it pushes the roadrunner off a ledge and the timer starts over.
How it works?
In terms of functionality, the primarily the user can reset their high score, and enable/disable the feature.
In the settings, users can set the intervals of “roadrunner’s running milestones”
Some potential ideas were a bed time setting and providing an option to compress the notifications to just icons which could help with urge the user to unlock the phone.
Deliverables
High Fidelity Mockups
Sketches of Ideas for Process
Process
Design Process & Initial Ideas
I started off the process with looking at the prompt which talked about “attention is a resource” and “The experience of being bored, and of working on your own to overcome that boredom” as leading concepts to think about. Pondering about these concepts I started thinking about the job at hand and I came up with ideas.
Following are my initial ideas and explanations on the ideas.
Be Bored
The idea here was that essentially creating an app to schedule “bored time” and the app gives the users a prompt to be creative while they are being bored ad the phone goes into do not disturb mode.
The app uses user’s interests to suggest the user what they can do while they get bored from the list of things they are interested in or things they have never tried.
The last piece of the idea was creating a community to share what the user created in that time of boredom. But I kind of realized creating a social media out of this might not be exactly what we are aiming to do.
In the Moment
This was a pretty basic but kind of genius idea to help those who are super impulsive about just checking their phones even though they are trying to avoid it. Specially during dates or meetings, etc.
The “app” essentially disables the lift to wake up the phone, gives the user the option to select number of taps on the screen or presses on the power button it will take to wake up the phone.
The idea being that if the user catches themselves unlocking the phone as they panic why the phone doesn’t unlock immediately, they will get back in the conversation at hand.
The App Shuffle
The idea behind this app was idea about people having a hard time winding down and going to bed.
The idea is an interaction which past bedtime starts relocating the most used apps across the multiple home screens and folders and I was toying with the idea of hiding the most used apps such as social media for a few seconds every time the user unlocks their phone past bed time that they have set.
This would help them not get lost in the endless scrolling at night. At this point, I was thinking about how the app will explain it’s functionality to the users and what functions it actually has. I had a few “onboarding” sort of gifs explaining the functions with the signifiers to enable these functions.
I felt like this would be a really good idea to work with but it could be rather difficult to prototype in high fidelity if I want it to look good within the time bounds. So, I decided to move with my other ideas
Unlock Screen Goals
The idea behind this one comes from the technology addiction and how people keep unlocking their phones every other minute checking on notifications and then spending a lot of time on the screen.
The idea was to gamify the lock screen and essentially make not unlocking the phone the goal of the game.
I really liked this idea as it did end up as one of my final ideas which is displayed later.
The Second Bubble
The idea here was to make use of the preexisting functionality from the screen on time and making the users more aware of how they are doing with their goals while not having it in their face with push notifications and popups.
I thought about using the notification bubble that is pretty standard but adding a “second bubble” which appears after a certain threshold of the app being used by the user.
I really liked the idea because I feel like giving a subtle reminder whenever the user is about to open an app is better than giving one “Your time is almost over” in the notifications. I will expand on this.
Iterating into the final form
After the initial ideas, I looked through them and I felt like I liked three of them quite a bit. The “App Shuffle” fascinated me but I ruled it out due to time constraints. I liked the Second Bubble and the Unlock Screen Goals. I decided to expand my ideation and iterate / add on to those ideas
Following are expanded versions of 2of the 5 previous ideas and mockups of how a user would interact with it.
The Second Bubble
In all honesty, there wasn’t a whole lot I could think about adding to this experience.
I sketched out some ideas for how the users can set up the second bubble experience for their devices. I did move on to create Hi-Fidelity Prototypes for this and turned it into a fully fleshed out interaction.
Initial Idea
Final Version with onboarding
Roadrunner Time away from Screen
The idea started with gamifying “not using the phone” and I took it places with a sudden idea of the road runner. Since I was looking to gamify and I was thinking about something running across the screen. I also wanted to save the upper half of the screen for the regular stuff, road runner came to my mind and I kind of based it around it.
I feel like this in a way incentivizes the users not to unlock the phone or delay their urge to unlock their phone quite effectively with the gamification. I might be wrong as there’s not much research I did to back my words. But I did turn it into a high fidelity which looks rather cute.
The entire primary interaction happens on the lock screen. (except settings/reset the score, etc.)
Initial Idea
Final Version turning to the idea of Road Runner
Reflection
Working on this exercise was a little challenging as I had to put myself out of my comfort zone. Being someone who is rather addicted to his mobile and social media, it was hard to think about my own antidotes.
It was quite a fun experience however realizing the thing I just sketched, I could probably use and benefit from. I feel like it was also a fun exercise as I was able to get some fun interactive mockups out of it showing off my interaction design skills (something I most likely am going to try to specialize in) and my complimentary visual design skills.