DigiLyfe tracks how much time you spend on your phone apps

4 min readFeb 5, 2017

15 years ago there weren’t any smartphones, since then a lot of things have changed. Smartphones have become an essential tool for our daily lives. Our smartphone is our personal assistant, it makes our lives easier and more convenient. We are never out of touch anymore, neither with friends nor with the world at large.

There are many positive aspects of using smartphones; getting timely information, entertainment, connecting with family and friends from anywhere. On the other hand, the smartphones have also impacted our lives negatively, sometimes it’s the undesired interruptions, sometimes it’s the long undesired duration we spend of them, mental disconnection from family who live under the same roof.

How can we embrace the positive impact of smartphone use and mitigate its negative aspects?

THE PROCESS

We decided to take time and observe participants use smartphones as they went about their daily lives. Our aim was to gain a close and intimate familiarity with each participant interacted with their smartphone. The observations led us to participants workplaces, homes, church and inside the cars as they were running errands. We interviewed the participants at the end of each observation period.

We learned that there are some apps that the users wanted to spend more on, such as online education, video calls with family who were far away. On the other hand, there are some apps that user liked but would like to monitor since they consumed too much of their time.

When at specific locations the users didn’t want notification interruptions. Some participants user lost track of time while playing games on the phone. When at home the users shared their smartphones with other family members. The participants wanted to know how much time they spend on specific apps.

Ideation

We also wanted to present the user with data of their phone habits. We would show them how much time they spend on each app, then give them controls to set limits.

We wanted to develop a solution that let the user categorise apps between the productive apps and time waster apps, then show the progress data between productive apps vs time waster apps.

Prototyping

We presented our ideas to the user early in the design stage in the form of paper prototype. We got valuable feedback that helped use improve on the app design.

We continued to engage the user by using with iterative design methodology of prototyping, testing, analyzing, and refining as we improved on the design of the application.

DigiLyfe — The App

After downloading the app, the first thing the user does is categorizing the apps, between time well spent vs time waster apps, the tracking process starts in the background and continues even when digiLyfe is not not open.