BreakFree is a light weight app-blocking app, its meant to reduce your daily social media usage. In this internship, I work closely with designers, stakeholders to bring up the competitiveness of this app. This app is currently in the app store.
This is an app-shipping internship, goal is to attract funders and ship.
Redesign & ship mobile app in 3 month
3 UX designer
Jingfei Hu, Robin King
1 Dev team
1 Project owner
Competitive analysis
Design system
Information Architecture
A behavioral training app that help you set up “challenges” to block your app.
After you win your “challenge”, get rewards by breaking your vicious social media addiction
Increase user acquisition and driving more sign-ups.
Successfully reduce screen time through quick & simple interaction
Homepage is the place our user will spend most of the time in. It's cruicial when we redesign this page, ensuring all the important information can be clearly, an quickly seen.
We made some core changes in terms of the app's information architecture and navigation system. All for our users to create a challenge as fast as possible.
BreakFree 1.0 does not has as much consistency in terms fo visual systems such as component, colors, and font. It's also crucial for our visual system to stay up-to-date with our competitors.
At first glance, the app is functional, therefore we need to find out the "whys" for this redesign. We conducted meetings with our stakeholder, knowing the goal of this project to have a clearer picture and to making timelines.
“We want this redesign to solve usability problems, right now its “hard to use” according to our user.
“ Breakfree now looks outdated, unlike the competitor apps on app store”
Research methods: 6 surveys, 3 in-depth interview, and App store reviews
Our negative feedback from app store does gave us insight that our user feels confused when navigating in our app after onboarding. To understand our user’s expectation better, we issued 6 surveys and 3 in-depth interview with users that are fresh to this app.
Above is a simple simulation of the user flow when they first see this app
After our initial research, the main problems becomes obvious: Confusion. Where the confusion comes from: Our users are spending a long time scrolling and navigating through different screens, our screen space are cluttered and inefficient, important information are hidden.
I learn from the research that the navigation is confusing. Not just in terms of creating a challenge, but also for the user to navigate to other pages. We also realize that there's a lot of underutilization in the existing nav bar.
Looking at all our app's feature, we decided to a simple Kano model to identify the importance hierarchy of each feature.
Since this is an important decision making moment, we conduct in-person workshop
After redesigning our IA, we decided to add a shortcut for creating challenges at the bottom nav bar. Rather than putting our core feature at the bottom of the page as a card, we can utilize pop up and a inline style alternative.
Balancing real-estate in the precious homepage is also cruicial to out user's first impression of the app. We had previous feedback of how the challenge card can populate the homescreen very fast. This is because of how our greetings and challenge cards are unnecessarily big,
Our old design system contains inconsistency across the app. Not only this will confuse our users, it will also damage the initial impression of how our users sees our app.
When looking at similar app, Efficiency", "Minimal", and "Clean" are usually the core tonality. With the established impression of a productivity app, which will become our redesign direction.
Since this is an important decision making moment, we conduct in-person workshop
An established system will gain us better first-impression.
Attract 4+ potential collaborating companies, sign up increased
Screentime & navigation time reduced +better ratings.
Stakeholder and designer has completely different mentality. Cross education, we teach you the design process, you teach us the business side of things
Polishing screen with design system does not always comes last.
In terms of business presentations, we need to show polished screen before finishing designing userflow, this happens.