During the Summer of 2024, I led a 0→1 personal project designing a mobile application to make managing screen time interactive and fun 💐
I led all product strategy, product design, and branding design.
UX Designer
Motion Designer
Product Manager
Figma
Adobe After Effects
July - August 2024
4 Weeks
You guessed it - that’s how much time the average person spends on Social Media every. single. day (according to datareportal.com).
What else could we do with that amount of time?
Read 150 Pages of a book
Run 12-15 Miles
Watch 1 Movie
Travel 200 Miles
The problem of social-media addiction is felt universally. People have time in their day for hobbies, spending time with others, or more pastimes they value, but often find themselves stuck with an easier alternative - picking up their phone.
How might we... get phone users off their phone and participating in activities that are more rewarding uses of time?
Before diving into Figma, I took a look at what existing solutions exist in the marketplace.
The time management platform I currently use - a 3rd party application where users must solve puzzles in order to re-gain access to an app.
Difficulty to override: Restrictions are tough to override, and the time spent on the puzzles reminds users that their time could be more valuably spent elsewhere.
Paywall: Unpluq limits users to only setting 2 time limits in their free plan. Users may turn to other social media sites that are not blocked to "replace" the experience.
An unconventional solution I observed peers take is to delete social media apps they find they spend too much time on, removing the problem altogether.
Ease of Override: Users can easily use the web-app version of the social media app via the internet app.
Lack of Access: Users still value the social media platform, and want some level of access to the app.
Native to the apple ecosystem, Apple allows users to set limits on applications, both based on time of day and by individual app.
Cross-Platform Functionality: Users can't override restrictions by going on another device
Ease of Override: Users can easily ignore time limits, with little accountability if they do.
When observing peers and myself using these apps, I found just how quickly we could discover and take advantage of loopholes. Be it ignoring the screen time warnings, going on web apps, or even deleting the time limits all-together, it was far too easy to ignore screen limits when they became inconvenient.
I narrowed down my findings into 2 universal truths around screen time management:
Users need accountability... beyond themselves to stay on track with screen time management.
Users need motivation...
to continue using a time management platform, even when it gets frustrating.
Let's reimagine this experience...
Garden uses social features to empower accountability and gamified goal setting to increase user motivation. Let’s dive into the features:
Manage specific apps using specific time restrictions with friends. Set a tangible goal, and watch your shared garden grow to your goal.
Garden overrides your apps once you reach your daily limit. Don’t worry - we’ll send you alerts as you approach your limit for the day.
Track your screen time for each of your goals - comparing day-to-day and week-to-week! Check in with friends to compare your trends.
Bear the fruits of your labor by checking your Garden - where flowers accumulate for each goal accomplished. Share with friends, or check out your entire community’s accomplishments in the Community Garden.
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For this exercise, I wanted to understand how to position Garden within the market in order to ensure my designs would not only create an impactful user experience, but also draw business impact.
Garden’s Value Proposition is that user’s can take back their free time to spend on more valuable activities. I aligned Garden’s brand image with this aspiration, utilizing fun, lighthearted graphics to associate joy, rather than stress, with time management.
Design Motifs
Garden’s most iconic component is the flower basket, presented when users become locked out of an app.
Content Strategy
I strategically employed UX writing to empower users to continue their goals, while aligning time management with joy and minfulness.
Garden lives and dies by it’s social interactions, so I brainstormed ways for users to incentivize their friends to join the app. While onboarding, users are prompted to invite 5 friends to the app in order to get started.
In order for Garden to grow as an application and be routinely updated, it needs a consistent revenue stream through the app. I opposed the idea of integrating ads, as it goes against the product’s branding as an alternative to the hyper-commercialized space of social media. Instead, I opted for paywalling certain high-value features through a pro plan.
👥 Group Goals
Want to work towards a goal with your whole crew? Goals with 2+ participants will be paywalled. The “family” user archetype, which I hypothesize to have more expendable income and high value of time management, will more likely convert to a pro plan.
📈 3+ Goals
3 goals at once- You’re on a roll! Users will be prompted to upgrade their account when attempting to create more than 3 Goals at once. Through this, free users can still gain value through the app, but power users will be incentivized to upgrade.
Motion as a Storytelling Asset
Inspired by apps like Duolingo and Headspace, I realized how much animation can bring a product to life. I self-taught myself Adobe After Effects and researched motion design principles, in order to interject moments of delight into a difficult experience - time management.
Conveying Emotion through UI
In previous experiences, I was always able to consult a UX Writer to employ content design effectively. Since this was a solo project, I had to learn how to balance content to have emotion in order to motivate users, while being direct enough for the UX to be easily understandable.
Unblocking users with new Figma Community Features through Usability Testing ↗
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Designing actionable upgrade incentives for GoDaddy Users ↗
UX Design
internship
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