Fish Tank Focus App Prototype
Course project · App prototype
For a course project, my team and I designed a focus app prototype that pairs mindful work with an aquarium of collectible creatures. The idea combines the enjoyment of unlocking and interacting with aquatic companions with opportunities to reflect on distracting habits. We wanted to encourage people to return to their goals through personal accountability, rather than making them feel guilty for losing focus.
We explored how other tools support focus. Focus Traveler offers a character who accompanies a task and climbs higher as the timer runs, using hand-drawn visuals and animation to make sustained effort feel rewarding. Flora ties focus to growing a digital tree, with the risk of losing it when users leave for a distraction. Apple’s App Limits take a more direct approach by prompting users when their allotted time is up. In our paired interviews, participants described how easy it was to extend those limits. For them, the feature was more useful as a reminder of time spent than as a barrier to continued scrolling.
Our concept combines collectible rewards with reflection prompts designed to appear when someone uses a distracting app. The questions ask users to recall why they started scrolling and what they have just seen. The intention is to interrupt automatic behavior with a moment of awareness: if someone cannot recall what they have been looking at, that pause might encourage them to close the app and return to their task. Alongside this reflection, unlocking aquatic creatures gives users something positive to look forward to.
Rather than relying on punishment for getting distracted, we wanted the experience to support deliberate choices. The aquarium provides an incentive to focus, while the reflection questions invite users to decide whether their current activity matches their intentions. We saw this combination as a promising direction for a more mindful focus tool. The project remains a prototype; whether these prompts help people return to their goals would need to be explored through further testing.