Intermission

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  Design guidelines

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Track

Track Two: Almost There

a. What is the problem your solution addresses? (150 word limit)

Most people open apps, especially social media apps, without meaning to. We have all doom-scrolled and felt horrible about it. The problem is not the scrolling itself. It is rather the moment right before it. It is that unconscious split second before opening an app. We conducted our own user research. This is an emerging problem for young adults, who are 92.2% of our survey of 77 responses. 58.5% open apps often without any purpose. 89.6% said boredom was the top reason. 75.4% forgot what they wanted to do after getting lost in some app. 85.8% felt guilty, annoyed or drained after mindless scrolling, but the habit continues nevertheless. We also learnt from online sources that app timers and other similar have not worked. We want to change that and make scrolling mindful, making sure users have full control over their distractions.

b. Why did you pick this solution, and how does it address the problem? (150 word limit)

Since existing solutions try to limit usage or were too easy to overcome restrictions, and our research showed that does not help with 79.2%, we built something different. Intermission intercepts the user right before they open a selected app and asks simple check-in questions to understand the user’s intentions. It lets them set a time limit. If they cross the time limit, the content becomes grayscale to reduce stimulation and motivate quitting. This is a soft nudge rather than a hard block. We conduct structured check-in with real-life activities reminders. 45.5% of people wanted this. After they leave, Intermission asks a reflection question about how they feel. Our survey directly shaped our feature decisions. Because 20% said they do not want to limit usage, we always have a skip option. The standalone app also shows usage data. Intermission aims to create awareness and mindfulness for the users.

Inspiration

We have all doom-scrolled. We have all lost track of time, put our phones down, and felt horrible about it. We wanted to do something about that feeling and make the activity more mindful. That is where Intermission came from.

What it does

It starts with the user selecting the apps and some preferences. The overlay variant of the app will interrupt every time they want to open the selected apps with questions that allow the user to be more mindful about their purpose of opening the app. The app keeps a structured check-in by turning content into grayscale if it has been too long (gray scale reduces distractions and motivates users to quit the app) and some real-life activities. After quitting the app, our app asks reflection question to understand how the user feels. Our standalone variant of the app will show usage statistics and other relevant information to help the user understand their usage.

How we built it

We first brainstormed every feature we want for the app, and created an extremely detailed list of each feature. Then we came up with our design guidelines. After that, we set off on Figma, making just extremely low-fidelity wireframes for the design of each feature. We slowly improved each frame and each feature, leading to refinement of the finest details.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we ran into were figuring out our typography and creating the animation flow. We eventually figured out our typography, with the guidance of several mentors. We dealt with animations by trial method. We would create animations leading to errors elsewhere and solve them leading to errors somewhere else and then solving them and so on.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our self-conducted user research through Google Forms which received 77 responses. It was also nice to create our own brand book with our own design guidelines. We are also proud of creating the single-choice options with our Figma knowledge. Creating the text field with the design constraints was also nice.

What we learned

We learnt how to do user research as this was the first time we implemented our own survey. We learnt how to get ask insightful questions and how to read relevant data, and hence provide them in the service we are building. Figma in itself was a learning curve as we got to learn how to use components and effects better. We learnt how to create single-choice options using components. We also learnt several design principles like predefining styles to use them throughout.

What's next for Intermission

We look forward to add a few more frames with more features which can help take the app further. We are looking to code this design into a real app and build an MVP. Letting users use the MVP will help us compare statistics with our user research. We can use the usage data and survey data for further improvements.

Built With

• figma