Blocked:
A Better Screen
Time Manager
Industry Timeframe Role
B2C
Fall 2024
UI/UX Designer
The average student experiences difficulty in managing screen time when current tools on the market are too complex or lack personalization.
Blocked targets these issues by catering to young adults through simple, yet effective features that keep users on track, and off their phones.
Primary Research Goals
Evaluate Goal Setting Effectiveness
Analyze how users manage screen time goals within existing apps, identifying challenges with maintaining motivation.
Assess the impact of notifications
Investigate the effectiveness of different notification types and frequencies, determining how they influence user engagement and behavior change toward screen time reduction.
Opal, an app popular among screen time managers, seemed to strike a balance between personalization and an intuitive UI. However, through usability audits, it seemed its demanding onboarding process discoraged newcomers.
Research
Before jumping into prototyping, I explored various research methods to understand what users value in screen time management apps.
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Defining Pain Points
Through interviews, surveys, and diary studies with over 30 college students, a few major frustrations with current screen time managers emerged.
Users desire more rigidity with screen time limits.
Although some participants expressed wanting more flexibility, most stated that their current tools aren’t strict enough and are too easy to bypass.
Users want more screen time data!
The data that screen time management tools, such as the inbuilt apple manager, don’t supply data fast enough for users to change behavior on a daily basis.
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Users desire personalized recommendations.
Recommendations would help users to actually know what realistic action steps to take in order to reduce their screen time.
Ideating
For Blocked, I focused on implementing user flows and features based on existing user pain points above
The primary feature of the app is the ability to instantly block a target app for yourself, and block target apps for friends, adding a strong social accountability factor.
User Personas
I created two user personas based on my research but ended up moving forward with Kleone, the social college student, to create my user journey and flows.
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StoryBoarding
Wireframing
Feature Development
Easy Onboarding
To simplify the onboarding process, I added the choice to upload screen time data and AI generated recommendations to lower the cognitive load on the user.
Target Apps + Blocking
Users would have the ability to identify which apps they would like to target in order to make goal setting and progress tracking more personalized to their needs.
These apps can be scheduled to be blocked or blocked instantly based on daily trends!
Social Accountability
Users would be able to add specific friends in order to track and potentially block target apps for specific friends and get them back on track.
User Testing revealed confusion with the home screen, and functionality of certain buttons. The primary feature, blocking target apps, seemed non-intuitive for new users.
I iterated on my design through multiple rounds of testing to strike a balance between intuitiveness and an engaging design system.
Final Design Decisions
For the Final Design, I took feedback from user testing, and also iterated on confusing features and language such as blocking friends and starting an app blocks.
Blocked does the heavy lifting, using user data to make it simple and quick for users to take control of their screen time.
The app actively encourages users to step away from their phones and engage in offline activities!
Here are some takeaways
Building an app targeting negative behavior demanded a slightly different research process. I was able to identify focus areas such as onboarding and rigid screen time management that seemed particularly important to users.
There’s a lot more research to be done in how we can turn good digital behavior into habits.
If I were to return to this project, I would do more research into how goal setting can play a role in encouraging more long term habits.