Zenie
A gamified approach to
help promote digital wellbeing.
Duration
10 Weeks
Responsibilities
Interaction Design, Visual Design, User Flows, Rapid Prototyping
Tools
Figma, Miro, Adobe Suite
BACKGROUND / my role
This is part of a design challenge as part of User experience Design and Testing course where we were tasked with exploring problems and issues regarding one's digital wellbeing.

I wanted to dig deeper into this problem space to understand how people are getting impacted and how we can help them to try and reduce the negative effects of too much screentime.
Problem
What happens when people spend too much time on their smartphones? How can we help them maintain a healthy digital wellbeing and manage screentime?
Research
Understanding the problem
I wanted to find out how and to what extent digital technology affects people's lives. So, I started by conducting qualitative research where I interviewed 8 users to and synthesized 104+ insights to gain insight into their feelings and experiences with digital technology. The goal was to learn about the problems they're facing, why they're facing those problems, and what they want to do to feel better about their digital well-being.
Lack of exposure
Many users felt that they haven’t had much exposure to digital well-being solutions and the ones who did found it hard use them as  they were hidden away in settings.
Sleep deprived
some of the users stated they were staying up late and using their phone and being tired all day as a result.
Getting distracted
Users said they were not able to stay focused on tasks as they were feeling the need be on social media.
Negative emotional Impact
Some of the users stated that they were feeling anxious as they were on their devices more often than they’d like.
What did they do about these issues?
Some of the users were not even aware of the Digital wellbeing features present in their smartphones because they were scattered either in the settings or hidden away in menus while others tried apps but didn’t stay adhered to their goals as they didn’t feel motivated enough.
Vision
Design a mobile based solution to provide a better way to inform and improve the digital wellbeing of the users.
Solution Goal: Improve feature discoverabiltiy
Everything at a glance.
Get a better sense of your digital well-being, create tasks, set focus and track
sleep all at one place.
Goal: Promote motivation
Points system.
Get rewarded for disconnecting and embracing the things that matter most. Whether it's spending quality time with your loved ones or simply taking a much-needed break from your device, earn points for every moment spent off-screen.
Get incentivized to promote your digital well-being, And a reminder to stay on track and not get distracted. (dropping focus is considered for the well being analytics.)
Goal: Promote motivation
Suggestive rewarding
You can create tasks and track statistics regarding your task completion rates, tag the task to a specific theme, and get rewarded when you complete a task.
Goal: control Distractions
Limit apps and screentime.
Set boundaries, prioritize your well-being, and optimize your productivity across all applications with ease.
goal: make analytics understandable
More comprehensible analytics.
An easier way to quickly comprehend and evaluate your wellbeing status.
process
Here's how I got to the solution.
After pushing out 16 ideas, I narrowed it down to 3 concepts for providing motivation. We then chose to move forward with the gamification approach and suggestive rewarding as a means to motivate the user.
Gamification to make users feel rewarded. ✅
Promotes wellbeing by quantification which could in-turn result in improved motivation and provides for a more flexibility than specified challenges or fixed goals.
Detox goals to provide motivation. ❌
Lack of flexibility in detox goals might not accommodate individual differences or varying needs.
Challenges for different ways to pass time and stay off-screen ❌
The effectiveness of challenges depends on the availability and appeal of the suggested offline activities. Challenges may not cater to individual preferences or cultural differences, limiting their relevance and effectiveness. Designing and curating a diverse range of challenges requires ongoing effort and resources.
exploration
Initial iterations.
I wanted to visualize the ideas as quickly as possible so, I started rough hand-sketching to iterate and move through design options quickly.
Roughly sketching out ideas for key screens and flows for the solution.
Once I got a bit of clarity on the layout, I then moved to designing early stage concept to quickly test the initial solution. During this process, I prioritized that sleep tracking and stats as they needed to be clear so that the user doesn't confuse between sleep analytics and screen analytics.
Mid-fidelity explorations to visualize an the structure and flow.
With a clear idea of the structure and updates from the initial feedback, I designed the solution to reduce the amount of information presented to the users at once, Added a signifier to inform the users about the state of their digital wellbeing and suggestions for improvement, made the analytics simpler and easy to understand, and provided motivation by quantifying actions with points.
validation
Testing the solution with users.
To validate the solution, I conducted a user testing session with 5 participants performing the same tasks. The testing involved both Quantitative and Qualitative questions with most questions being open-ended.
Categorized feedback by what went well and what didn't to understand where we could improve.
THE BIG PIVOT
Improving the experience.
after looking at the feedback from the testing session, it was apparent that the purpose of the solution lacking in some areas. Users stated that the screen time display is similar to the focus input and the view summary is hard to reach and they were not able to find the analytics easily.

I redesigned the flow with this change in mind to make sure all the features are easily discoverable while keeping the interface design simple.
validation
Results and Impact
Established metrics like user satisfaction, Time on task, and Task success rate and tracked them to measure the success and measure the impact of the design quantitatively.
goal setting time
-26.74%
Thoughts about language
Affirming
Satisfaction
4.8/5
Reflection
Pivotal Insights.
  • The incentivized rewards and the show of progress actually help users better evaluate the gap between where they are at and what they wanted to achieve.
  • Users might get confused at times if they didn't see any conformational feedback when they are performing a task, they needed some sort of an affirming signifier to stay confident with their actions.
    ‍
Next Steps.
There is still a lot more to be explored with Zenie. I need to conduct more in-depth research with a larger group of people to figure out underlying issues and could also explore anti-personas and scenarios to figure out possible ways a user might misuse or detract from the solution, and explore more ways to incorporate gamification meaningfully. For instance, we can integrate with wearables and provide a more cohesive experience, we can add perks for the user to use points for buying something in the real world.
Problem
Solution
Process
Impact