Downtime
Encouraging a healthy digital balance in young adults.
Kevin-generated Overview
Designed and prototyped a mobile solution to manage screen time for the 2025 UCLA Designathon.
Prompted to create a fun, engaging, and mindful solution to help people reclaim balance and combat digital addiction. Empower users to manage screen time, prioritize mental well-being, and foster a more intentional relationship with technology.
The Problem at Hand
Unhealthy feedback loops cause excessive screen time use in young adults.
Young adults need a healthy and engaging way to manage screen time habits, as excessive screen use is weakening real-world social connections and harming attention spans.
The Solution
Utilize last place aversion lower screen time to healthy levels.
That's the TL;DR. Now let's dive into our process!
Research
What kind of relationship do young adults have with technology, and what are their challenges?
Literature Review
Screen time + addictiveness = health concerns.
Screen time averages in teen/young adults are too high.
Americans average 7 hours and 3 minutes of daily screen time (above ideal 2hr maximum).
~50.4% of American teenagers report spending 4 or more hours daily on screens for non-educational purposes.
High screen time contributes to health issues.
Detrimental to social & emotional growth.
Increased likelihood of obesity (1.53x higher), sleep disorders (59% increased insomnia risk), & mental health conditions (88% increased depression risk)
Existing solutions are too easy to ignore or quit.
Existing apps are for solo users, no accountability.
Easy to ignore warnings or delete the app altogether.
User Personas
Here's how excessive screen time negatively affects a variety of young adults with specific pain points.
Joshua is a junior at UCLA. He has been increasingly upping his screen time. He used to love playing beach volleyball at Sunset Rec and playing board games with friends. But now, he spends most of his time on YouTube, TikTok, and mobile games. It gets in the way of his real life connections.
Goals
A way to avoid doomscrolling
Feel more motivated to hand out with friends
Use tech in a way that makes improves his life
Frustrations
Feels restricted by apps that limit screen time
Doesn't feel compelled to stop scrolling even when aware of it.
Misses friends, feels lonely
Makena is a senior in high school. She has been using Instagram instead of studying for AP Physics C and the SAT! It's distracting her and worsening her attention span, affecting her studying.. She also has been falling asleep during class, causing her to fall further behind.
Goals
Improve productivity
Study efficiently without phone as distraction
Pass exams to get into UC Berkeley
Frustrations
Mental and physical health declining
Can't get enough sleep
Can't get off her phone despite her college aspirations
HMW
How might we leverage friendly competition to make the act of putting down a phone feel more rewarding than picking it up?
Design
View leaderboards & competitive stake for each group
View leaderboards displaying standings and the competitive stake for each group.
Preset and user inputted competition challenges in place of monetary stakes.
Our original idea was to implement a small, ~$0.50 "buy in," where the pot would go to the winner for that month.
This introduced a financial barrier, blocking many users; both those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and those unwilling to essentially gamble money on a recurring basis.
To combat this, we opted for prewritten challenges for equality and to reduce friction for indecisive users.
Added user-inputted challenges and a voting process for groups that desire more meaningful stakes.
Leaderboards per group, not entire friends list.
In multiple iterations, we had a leaderboard displayed on the home page of a user’s entire friends list.
However, our app’s differentiator is that friend groups compete to avoid a last place punishment decided within that group. Viewing a larger friends list leaderboard would provide no motivation to reduce screen time.
We removed the broader friend leaderboard from home screen that didn’t provide sufficient competitive encouragement. Display leaderboard within groups who share a stake for last place.
Iterative lo-fi design helped us produce under extreme time constraint.
Many previous iterations tried to display valuable information/data about the user and their social circle, including throwing low-motivation leaderboards out there. To create the least laborious user flow, we removed useless information from the homepage, including these leaderboards, and emphasized groups as the place to view current standings.
Status updates & notifications to display friends' streaks & stats
Live status updates & notifications displaying friends' streaks and statistics.
Status updates on home page & user profile to add value to individual user information
We considered removing screen time stats and progress due to redundancy with phones’ built in screen time monitoring.
Individual user streaks also felt unrelated to our app’s core differentiator: small group competition.
Rather than remove this information, we used status updates and notifications to bridge the info with the social dynamics of the app's core value.
Now, friends' progress updates are displayed prominently on the home page and are available under "updates" on user profiles, motivating users to reduce their screen time use alongside friends. This motivation is independent of the competitive "last place aversion" stakes, so the updates are not limited to specific groups.
Past iterations.
Updates were given various levels of importance in previous iterations, sometimes dominating the home screen and other times being an afterthought. We decided to give it near-equal emphasis as the "last place groups" section on the home page, and adding individual updates on user profiles was a later feature we implemented.
Reflection and takeaways
The Paradox of a Screen-Time App
Designing for this unique problem regularly presented us with the paradox: How do you make an interface engaging enough to be useful, but not so addictive that it adds to the problem?
I learned to prioritize Utility over 'Delight.' Instead of using high-dopamine animations or infinite scrolls, I focused on clean, efficient UI that gives the user the information they need in seconds so they can lock their phone and return to the real world. Success for DownTime isn't 'Time in App,' it’s 'Time spent Offline.' Understanding complexities in a problem space helps me stay grounded in intricate product design.
Timeline
7 hours
Team
3 Designers —
Akira Wolfe
Jennifer Yamashita
Me
My Role
Product Designer —
User Research
UX, UI Design
Prototype Design
Skills
FigJam, Figma
Design Advocacy
Accolades
1st Place, 2025
UCLA Designathon