Nudge: Helping Users Set Technology Goals

The Goal: Encouraging Consumers to be Creators

Nudge is a project I worked on during my time in Northwestern's Bay Area Immersion Program. I worked as the only developer in a team of design and journalism students. We were tasked with re-imagining parental controls in a technologically-dominated society. Over the course of the project, we strayed away from this in favor of using technology as a positive factor that can increase your productivity. We noticed that a lot of the users we interviewed felt that they spent too much time consuming media on technology, and they weren't doing enough creating.

Research of Existing Parental Controls

With the initial task of re-imagining parental controls, we researched already-existing solutions. We found that all of these services were focused on parents moderating the content and screen time of their child, and there were not a lot of services for users who want to limit their own screentime without third-party approval.

Brainstorming A New Direction

After our research, we decided that we wanted to pivot away from parental controls. Instead, we decided to create something similar to a "digital diary" where the user could be responsible for their own screen time and content consumption.

Lots of students in the program expressed that they often spend a long time consuming social media, and wish they had something to keep them accountable for working on personal projects, class work, etc.

Initial Testing

With this new direction, we started doing initial testing with other students in the program. We sent out a form that asked people to state their goals for productivity, and had one member of our group text them "nudges" to start working.

We found that the test users thought this persona was too "nice" and not motivating enough. They also didn't like how the texts came at a seemingly random time, unprompted and unrelated to what their screen time was. We decided that we wanted to make a client application, so that users could customize how motivating these personas were, and when they would notify the user to be productive.

Basic Scenarios

We started working out scenarios that would prompt the persona to "nudge" the user. These scenarios are based on the user's screen time for various apps, and what settings they input into the client application.

I also started working out a basic interface design for the client application.

Wireframes in Figma

After I had a basic design, I started creating wireframes in Figma.

React Native: Final Product

After the wireframes were finalized, I developed a barebones application in React Native using Expo Client. A lot of the app is hardcoded, but this product is meant to be a demo for users to "get the idea." To avoid using a router, the navigation is done with a Controller.js component that keeps a global state of what page the user is on, and returns corresponding components accordingly.

Here is a video demo introduced and narrated by other students in the program.

Check out our GitHub Repository to view the code for final prototype!