How to get rid of gadget addiction

The text below describes the main idea of my Capstone Project on Interaction Design Course of University of San Diego.

Nowadays people are overwhelmed with the information which comes from various channels and mediums throughout the day. This has even caused the creation of “digital intoxication” and “gadget addiction” terms. I bet this negatively impacts people’s performance at work. Therefore, I wanted to learn how various social media distracts people from their working routine.
I started with observing my two fellows who excessively use social media during their working routine. From my observations, such people are being constantly distracted from their work by notifications and reacting to messages in social media.
As the result of my observations I’ve defined two points of views which were used as the basis for all my further work:

I want to use social media to stay updated with my friend’s activities, but I need to filter out the stuff that comes from the feed. Sometimes I need to spend a few minutes on social media just to wind down. But I don’t want to zone out for a long haul.
Also, I want to get rid of a habit of checking the phone every few minutes.

Both these POV relate to the design brief of Change: people require a change in their behaviors in order to increase their performance and get rid of feeling that they waste their lives.

During the ideation week I brainstormed a lot of ideas but due to technical limitations (we had to design the web app, not the native app) I decided to focus on the following opportunities which might help users to fix this:

— provide a way to limit the usage of messengers and social networks in a working routine.
— provide a way to indicate the time wasted on mindless browsing in a particular app.

So, next few weeks were spent on validating ideas via rapid prototyping, heuristic evaluations, planning all further activities. I’ve started implementing the final prototype in Axure tool and made various tweaks based on user reviews and remote A/B testings.
I’ve realized that it is rather hard for a user to understand the aim of the app from the first sign. Thus I’ve added the comprehensive tutorial at the onboarding flow:

The initial version of the prototype contained only separated screens for the SM stats:

Yet A/B testing has proven that having the summary screen as the starting point is more preferable by users:

This project was the great experience where I had a chance to go through all stages of the design process. Each stage is important, outcomes of each stage lead to insights on what can be improved.

As someone says, design is never done. Therefore, there is still a bunch of improvements in the pipeline, but they all fall far beyond the scope of the Capstone Project.

Thanks!