Transforming the everyday object
There’s always been a feature that everyone on our team has secretly dreamed about. The feature that was waiting for its turn. Something that would unlock further purpose for why Ratio exists as a product. However, we held back building it until we could bring a premium user experience to Ratio.
First, we built the Z18 phone, and then a couple of years later, we released the Ratio app on the Google Play Store. In a relentless endeavor to change the oversaturated digital landscape, with a desire to bring liberation to people’s attention in the most intimate digital space — smartphone. The object that contains worlds in the palm of your hand.
We saw how a transformation of an everyday object, a smartphone, could make a significant change in people’s lives. From distraction to focus, from procrastinating to productivity.
Ratio never fully belonged in the launcher space. It started as an app that was meant to replace your original OS and clear the visual clutter. As we developed new productivity-focused features, Ratio carved its own niche: homescreen.
Even from its early development, Ratio offered more than a single launcher does: features that support deep focus and preserve attention (such as Conversations, where you can find all your messaging platforms in one inbox). Launchers just launch apps. That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less.
Digital Wellbeing
After releasing Ratio publicly in December of 2020, we spent all of our efforts stabilizing the Ratio experience for our users — sometimes rewriting entire core features from scratch.
We made hard decisions to improve Ratio before we set out to tackle something bigger — the feature ecosystem we’ve been internally talking about since the early days of Blloc.
Digital Wellbeing is a feature ecosystem because the features will work together for the purpose of sustaining your freedom and attention away from alluring distractions. It’s a new branch of our design and development focus that prioritizes our users’ awareness and change of their digital patterns.
We knew that we’re going up against the rest of the industry and the attention economy, as we saw a growing capitalization of human focus.
We started by reverse-engineering and deconstructing dark patterns of attention-extractive apps. Now we’re building something that will allow you to step into further liberation of your personal focus.
Usage Goals
Usage Goals is our first feature of Ratio Digital Wellbeing. It’s a simple, yet effective way to track your app usage and practice mindfulness while using your smartphone. You decide how much time you want to spend on each app — there is no right or wrong amount. You can track how much time you have left for the apps you’ve set usage goals for, right on the homescreen.
Ratio will help you reach your app usage goals, regardless of the amount of time you set.
Here’s how it works:
- Go to Ratio Settings > Digital Wellbeing >Usage goals.
- Tap Usage Goals and choose your limits for each app.
- You will be able to track your time spent in app at a glance, and choose to receive Ratio reminders if you’ve reached your daily limit.
- Soar in your productivity.
Once you have the feature enabled you can also set and edit goals for any app with a long press and selecting Usage Goal.
We hope you make the best out of this first feature in Digital Wellbeing.
Let us know about your experience with this short survey.
