SPENT
•Digital Wellness •Productivity •Mobile •Personal Project
TL;DR
Phone addiction has quietly become the most defining trait of this generation.
Gen Z is on track to spend 15 years of their lives scrolling social media.
Spent reframes phone use metrics into something more visceral and meaningful, turning abstract statistics into powerful visualistions, impactful insights, and social accountability.
Introduction
Context
In 2025, the average Gen Z person spends nearly 7 hours per day on their phone — the equivalent of 15 years over a lifetime. Phone addiction has quietly become the most defining trait of this generation.
While screen time trackers exist, they often fail to make an impact. Many overwhelm users with endless graphs and app-by-app breakdowns, or gamify productivity in ways that feel shallow. Numbers like “3h 42m today” are easy to dismiss because they lack meaning and context.
The real issue isn’t access to data — it’s the absence of context and emotional weight. Without understanding what those hours add up to in the long run, users can’t truly connect their digital habits to the life trade-offs they represent.
Spent was designed to meet this cultural moment. By treating time as currency, it reframes phone use into a visceral, big-picture view of how much of our life is being exchanged for screen time. It introduces social comparison for accountability, delivering not just awareness but reflection — and turning reflection into action.
Research
To better understand the problem space, I conducted interviews with users aged 13 to 60 about their digital habits and feelings toward phone usage. Across all age groups, participants described a direct link between phone use and quality of life. Many reported that heavy screen time contributed to diminished happiness, reduced free time, and even poorer academic or professional outcomes.
Younger participants often connected phone use to lower grades and declining mental health, while those in their 20s admitted to trying (and failing) to reduce screen time. The overwhelming takeaway was that phone use has become an unspoken addiction.
On average, interviewees reported around 6 hours of daily screen time. When presented with the statistic that Gen Z users who average 7 hours a day are on track to spend 15 years of their lives scrolling, participants expressed genuine shock. Framing screen time as a lifetime trade-off proved to be the most impactful insight, highlighting that how the data is represented matters more than the raw numbers themselves.
User Personas
Based on the research and user interviews, I created five personas that capture common patterns of phone use and pain points:
Competitive Audit Direct Competitors
I audited both built-in screen time tools (Apple/Android) and third-party apps.
Built-in trackers raise awareness but fail to deter use. Lockout features are easily bypassed with a single tap, turning “15 more minutes” into hours.
Gamified apps offer playful incentives to use your phone less, but without meaningful rewards or consequences, they are quickly forgotten.
Key Problems with Existing Screen Time Trackers
Too much data: Overwhelming graphs and breakdowns bury the real issue.
Too little meaning: Abstract numbers fail to resonate.
Lack of emotional weight: Tools rarely make users reflect on what they’re losing.
Ineffective deterrents: “Soft” timeouts or app limits don’t prevent prolonged use.
Looking Beyond Screen Time Apps
Because screen trackers alone weren’t producing lasting impact, I extended the audit to wellness, fitness, and education apps that successfully influence behaviour. The aim was to uncover transferable strategies that could make screen-time reduction more effective.
Several of the most popular wellbeing apps were examined, including Strava, Duolingo, BeReal, and MyFitnessPal. What stood out was their ability to tie progress tracking back to social presence — making habits visible to peers and therefore more motivating.
Wellness/education apps like Strava, Duolingo, BeReal, and MyFitnessPal revealed useful patterns. Strava, in particular, showed the power of social accountability — progress becomes more meaningful when shared with friends. MyFitnessPal’s circular calorie tracker stood out as a clear, impactful visualization that instantly resonated with users.
Competitive Audit Indirect Competitors
Key Insight: A successful solution must combine clear, emotionally impactful visualizations with a social component that encourages accountability, much like how Strava makes fitness progress shareable.
Define
From the research and audit, I defined the core functions for Spent:
Track screen time in a straightforward, reliable way
Convert data into powerful, easy-to-read visuals that communicate meaning, not just numbers
Add a social layer to introduce accountability among friends
Avoid lockouts, instead focusing on reflection, awareness, and conscious trade-offs
User Stories
Based on the user personas the following user journeys were generated to help inform the direction of the design.
Mapping journeys revealed consistent patterns in how Spent drives reflection and change. Across demographics, users typically engage with their preferred social media before becoming aware of their screen time through a blunt notification. This moment of awareness creates an emotional pause, prompting reflection on missed opportunities—whether it’s studying, job hunting, family time, or self-care.
User journey experimentation confirmed that pairing data-driven notifications with a minimal, distraction-free interface could effectively convert awareness into action: users check their totals, adjust habits, and begin tracking progress over time. The journeys validate that Spent’s neutral tone and straightforward metrics motivate behaviour change without guilt or gamification.
Ideation
User Flow
The design intention for Spent was to remain streamlined and minimal, delivering information without unnecessary friction. The user flow was deliberately kept simple, with minimal interactions beyond onboarding and account setup.
The app is built around two core functions:
A screen time reader that reframes usage into meaningful metrics.
A social leaderboard that introduces accountability among friends.
Information Architecture
Outside of onboarding and account settings, all information resides in just two areas: the Home Page (personal usage) and the Friends Section (social accountability). This ensures clarity, focus, and minimal cognitive load.
Early Concepts & Sketches
The ideation phase began with rapid paper sketching to explore multiple ways of visualizing time. Concepts included bar graphs, line charts, report cards, and pie charts.
What resonated most was a circular design — a visual metaphor for a complete day. This format immediately conveyed the idea of time as a finite, recurring resource, making it the foundation of the design direction.
Low-Fidelity Prototype
A low-fidelity prototype was created using the proposed user flow and initial sketch concepts. This early version focused on the core navigation and screen hierarchy rather than polished visuals, allowing rapid iteration without investing heavily in styling.
Usability Testing:
A small group of target users—representing a range of screen-time habits—were asked to complete key tasks such as checking daily usage, viewing lifetime projections, and comparing their metrics with friends. Observing their interactions validated the simplified structure: participants could locate core features without confusion and complete tasks with minimal prompts.
Key Findings:
Smooth navigation: Testers consistently moved through the app without hesitation, confirming that the flow between summary views, detailed statistics, and social comparison screens was intuitive.
Clarity of information: Even with placeholder content, users reported that the labels and hierarchy made it clear where to find specific metrics.
Reduced cognitive load: Compared to existing screen-time tools, participants remarked that the stripped-back approach felt less overwhelming.
Outcome:
These results confirmed that the foundational layout and navigation logic were effective, giving confidence to proceed into mid-fidelity wireframes and visual design. By validating structure early, the team minimized rework later in the process and ensured future iterations could focus on refining aesthetics, accessibility, and emotional tone rather than fixing fundamental usability issues.
Concepting
With sketch ideas and general user flow sorted, experimentation moved into digital concepting .Circular visuals were refined through explorations in colour, scale, line weight, and imagery. These iterations emphasized clarity and emotional weight, balancing data-driven precision with visual impact.
Onboarding Experimentation
Time Spent Experimentation
Final Design
Design Guidelines
Aesthetics
The app’s visual style reinforces the theme of returning to tangible, non-digital expression. Depending on light mode, the interface emulates either chalk on a blackboard or pencil on paper, paired with minimalist layouts to keep focus on the content. This creates a tactile, analog aesthetic that stands in contrast to the digital addiction it critiques.
Design Language
Early explorations linked the circle to solar systems and planetary rotation, but these proved impractical for multi-day and multi-year visualizations.
The breakthrough came from tree rings, a metaphor for accumulated life. This evolved into a system where each full circle represents a day, with semi-circles showing percentages of daily use.
At the core of every screen sits a globe, subtly reinforcing the connection between time, life, and the world. Its size shifts across pages to emphasize scale and progression but always remains central to the view.
On the Today page, users see their daily usage as a half-circle. Swiping forward, circles begin to multiply, eventually leading to the Lifetime Estimate page, where the sheer accumulation delivers a visceral shock.
Social Leaderboard
The social leaderboard introduces accountability by comparing users’ screen time against friends. This feature leans on the power of social shame and pride — tapping into natural human competitiveness to encourage healthier digital habits. Unlike traditional trackers, this approach creates an external motivator that is both playful and effective.
Onboarding
Onboarding was designed to confront the user with the scale of their phone use from the very first interaction. It presents key statistics — such as the 15 years of life spent scrolling — to create a moment of shock and motivate change.
The visual backdrop uses public domain Edward Hopper paintings, chosen for their haunting depictions of solitude and isolation. By splitting text placement between the top and bottom of each painting, users are guided to absorb both the emotional weight of the artwork and the stark data on digital addiction, framing their usage as not just numerical but deeply human.
Functional High-Fidelity Prototype
Functional High-Fidelity Prototype
To bring Spent to life, I built a high-fidelity interactive prototype that closely mirrors the intended user flow, interface, and motion design. This prototype demonstrates how users will move through the app and how subtle animation supports its minimal, data-driven tone:
Microinteractions & Motion – Buttons, modals, and transitions use restrained animations to signal changes without distraction, ensuring the experience feels polished but not overwhelming.
Onboarding Journey – Smooth, scroll-based transitions guide users through key statistics like daily, yearly, and lifetime usage. Subtle fades, slides, and parallax effects create impact without adding visual clutter.
Main Dashboard Flow – The core home screen presents a single bold figure for daily screen time, with simple gestures to move between monthly, yearly, and lifetime metrics. The uncluttered interaction keeps the focus on the numbers.
Screen Animations - The Rings symbolizes time’s cycles and accumulation. As users scroll through daily, monthly, and lifetime views, the central globe scales in and out, while complete rings build up around it—each ring representing a full 24-hour day. This evolving graphic turns raw screen-time data into a clear, memorable visual of how days of life stack up over time.
Designed & Developed
by Zac Low