FocusShift
Shift from Doomscrolling to Meaningful Activities
Team
Problem and Design Overview
The Problem that Motivates Our Design
Many students struggle with the habit of doomscrolling, spending excessive time mindlessly browsing social media at the cost of more beneficial activities. This behavior often occurs during moments of academic stress or boredom and is reinforced by the instant gratification of social media content. However, students frequently report feeling more stressed and regretful after these sessions, as they realize the time lost could have been spent on more meaningful pursuits. The lack of compelling, accessible alternatives to doomscrolling exacerbates the problem, leaving students stuck in a cycle that diminishes their productivity and overall well-being.
Many people feel trapped, unable to escape excessive phone usage.
Our Design Approach
Our design tackles this pervasive issue by offering students engaging alternatives to doomscrolling that align with their long-term goals and interests. Unlike existing solutions that merely limit screen time, our system encourages active participation in fulfilling activities, such as hobbies or social interactions, by making these options accessible and rewarding. Through personalized incentives and reminders, the design shifts attention away from passive scrolling and toward meaningful engagement, fostering habits that promote well-being and productivity beyond the academic environment. By transforming the fleeting satisfaction of doomscrolling into lasting feelings of accomplishment and connection, our design empowers users to reclaim their time and prioritize what truly matters.
FocusShift encourages people to do meaningful activities instead.
Design Walkthrough
Our design focuses on providing users with meaningful alternatives to doomscrolling by offering two key tasks: engaging in solo activities or collaborating with friends. These tasks are designed to give users flexibility in deciding when to engage with the app based on their awareness of excessive doomscrolling. Rather than controlling when the user might be tempted to doomscroll, the system empowers them to choose when to act and take steps toward breaking the cycle. During the onboarding process, users specify their preferences for activities they enjoy or would like to try, such as hobbies, creative tasks, or social activities. These preferences are used to generate suggestions for activities that can replace doomscrolling. After users set their preferences, the app will automatically remind them of their goal and suggest activities aligned with their interests, encouraging them to keep working towards their set goals. The rationale for these tasks is to provide users with control over their alternatives while encouraging social interaction. Task 1 focuses on offering personalized activity suggestions for users who choose to engage in solo activities. Task 2 introduces the opportunity for collaborative activities with friends, helping users build a support network and stay motivated.
Solo Activity: Replacing Doomscrolling with Engaging Alternatives
The first task aims to help users replace doomscrolling with activities they find fulfilling. After users specify their preferences during onboarding, the app automatically sends suggestions for activities they might enjoy, such as sports, reading, journaling, or doing a quick workout. These suggestions encourage users to keep working toward their goal and remind them of the positive alternatives to doomscrolling.
The home page shows personal goal progress and activity suggestions.
When click “start” for the activity, a pop-up shows up to confirm the activity option.
Once they started, the ongoing activity would show up on the top, where they can see the time they have spent on the activity.
Collaborative Activity: Reducing Doomscrolling with Friends
The second task focuses on collaboration, where users can work together to reduce their doomscrolling habits. After users set their preferences and goals, they can collaborate with friends by participating in activities together that help replace doomscrolling, such as walking, socializing, or creative projects. This shared experience enhances accountability and provides mutual support, encouraging each participant to remain committed to their goal.
Current collaborations can be accessed from the main collaboration page, and each current profile can be pressed. New Collabs can also be started from this page.
Design Research and Key Insights
For our design research, our primary goals were to learn more about the root cause of doomscrolling as well as if people think it is a problem, and what they are doing about it if they do think it is a problem. To conduct our design research, we chose to interview 3 participants, 2 of whom are current UW students and one who is an engineer at Amazon. We chose these participants since we wanted to focus on younger people who are currently establishing life-long habits. We chose interviews so that we could establish a personal connection and dive deeper with our participants, since this would improve the quality of answers given the nature of the subject.
A Barrier to replacing Doom Scrolling: Convenience
When we asked participants about barriers to replacing doomscrolling with other activities, the most common answer was its ease and convenience. One participant shared:
"I’ve tried reading a book or going for a walk instead, but honestly, it’s just easier to pick up my phone and start scrolling. It takes no effort."
Another added:
"I know I should do something else, but it’s hard to start. Scrolling feels rewarding right away, and things like exercising just feel like too much work."
It was clear that a major reason people kept doomscrolling even though they knew it was harmful was convenience. This led us to two different approaches, making doomscrolling less convenient, or making other activities more appealing. After exploring both approaches, we ultimately chose a design that would make it easier to find other activities to do. This insight helped us think about ways we could reduce doomscrolling and narrowed down how we could approach this complicated problem.
Doomscrolling is Often Triggered by Boredom and Academic Stress
From our interviews, participants mentioned that they start doomscrolling when they are stressed out to escape, or when they are just bored. One person said:
"I tend to scroll the most when I’m stressed out, especially if I have an exam or an assignment due. It feels like a quick escape."
Another interviewee said:
"When I don’t have anything to do, I just start scrolling without even thinking about it."
This was important for us since if we wanted the user to doomscroll less, we knew we wanted a design that could help alleviate boredom and academic stress. Since doing activities that you enjoy is a healthier way to both relieve stress and boredom, this helped us know that encouraging the user to do alternative activities would reduce doomscrolling. Eventually, this became a key part of our design, largely due to this insight.
Participants Wanted to be Rewarded for Not Doomscrolling
When asked about what would help them replace doom scrolling with alternative activities, participants also mentioned rewards. One person said:
“If I could see how much time I’ve saved from not scrolling or track my progress in a different activity, I think that would make me feel more accomplished."
Another person said this:
"Getting a reward or seeing some kind of progress would make it easier to stick to something new. I need to feel like I’m gaining something, not just missing out."
When we thought about rewards for the user, we wanted to keep it simple. The feeling of accomplishing a goal is very rewarding, especially when done with a friend. A core part of our design is setting goals to do activities other than doomscrolling, and our design research helped lead to that.
Iterative Design and Key Insights
For our iterative design process, we first created basic sketches of tasks that were targeted at our design problem of reducing doomscrolling. After our sketches, we moved on to creating storyboards to more fully illustrate how the user would go through our tasks and interact with our design. From our storyboards, we created a paper prototype. Using our paper prototype, we conducted usability testing and we also had our paper prototyped evaluated using heuristics.
Early version of the FocusShift Paper Prototype
Throughout every step we received helpful feedback which allowed for iterative improvements on our approach. We also gained insights from the act of creating rough drafts, since it would allow us to see the ideas we had in mind more fully fleshed out. Our iterative design process allowed us to gain insights to gradually improve our design.
Sketching Tasks and Receiving Feedback to Choose Alternative Activities Task
Before we had chosen which design we wanted to further pursue, we had created multiple possible tasks to help reduce the amount of time people spend doomscrolling. We also grouped these tasks into possible designs that we could pursue, and created sketches for each design.
Early sketch of alternative activities page
After sketching multiple designs, we received feedback for each of our proposed designs and realized that the issue of reducing doomscrolling is very complicated, since it is effectively an addiction, and we decided to change our approach from directly reducing doomscrolling and lean into our other idea suggesting activities for people to do instead of doomscrolling.
Using Storyboards to Choose Rewarding Tasks from Designs
When we began storyboarding, we previously had two different designs we liked, one that was based around setting a screen time goal with a friend to reduce screen time, and another design that was based around receiving alternative activities, and also comparing screen time to time that could have been spent elsewhere. We were initially going to choose the latter design, but throughout our storyboarding process, we realized that comparing your screen time to what could have been was not a very rewarding task for the user.
We decided to take inspiration from our collaborative design, and we made a task where friends do activities together to reduce screen time. This also addressed an issue with the first design, allowing friends to have a means to reduce screen time instead of only a goal.
Early sketch of analytics page
Usability Testing to Make Collaborating with a Friend More Intuitive
After we had created our paper prototype, we conducted usability testing for people to try out our tasks. We had two testers, and both of them were able to complete our first task, "Substituting Doomscrolling with Another Activity", easily. However, our second test was less intuitive. Our testers were not sure where to proceed after starting a collaboration with a friend.
Since it was clear that our testers were not sure how to collaborate with a friend, we changed the location of activity suggestions for collaborations from the home page to the collaboration view page. This way, immediately after starting a collaboration, it would be clear to a user how they would collaborate with their friend, and they would not have to navigate to any other pages.
Collaboration space before and after usability testing.