Artist, Graphic Designer & Product Designer, NJ
Doom Devil
Preventing doom-scrolling on social media platforms by suggesting alternative daily tasks based on the user's mood.
Project type: End-to-end app + branding
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Role: UX/UI designer and User Researcher + teammates Valen Sonny and Fiona Gumaroy
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Industry: Mental Health, Fitness, Entertainment
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Tools: Figma, Adobe Illustrator
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Duration: March 2025
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Introduction
The Challenge
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Our task for the design hackathon was to create a platform that promotes Digital Wellness by addressing gaps in understanding, access, or resources across generations, regions, or social barriers.
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Doomscrolling, or the act of spending an excessive amount of time online scrolling through news or other forms of negative content on social media and the web, has been plaguing a large number of smartphone users. The phenomenon gained prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic when most people had no choice but to constantly check the media for news updates or entertainment. A glance at a notification may lead to hours of scrolling due to social media tactics, often posing a threat to mental health and productivity.
Objective
Design a mobile app aimed to intervene doom-scrolling by suggesting other activities depending on the user's mood as well as a digital experience that is easy to use and motivates the user to put down their phone to perform other tasks.
Research
Empathize
User Surveys
Conduct short survey with 10 individuals from the target audience to assess their screen time, doom-scrolling habits, and daily tasks.
Key Questions
What is your daily average screen time in hours?
On a daily basis, how often do you doom scroll?
What kind of activities do you do to stop doom scrolling?
What We Found
Doom-scrolling takes up at least 20% of screen time a day
Many participants doom-scroll an estimate of 1-2 hours daily and their average daily screen time is 7.3 hours. Simple search on the internet lets us know that a person spends around 16 hours awake per day, which suggests that individuals in our target audience spends around half of their days on their devices. Through some calculations, we discover that the participants spend around 20% - 50% of their screen time doom-scrolling a day.
Redirecting attention to tasks that requires high-concentration often ends doom-scrolling
To get out of their doom-scrolling haze, participants often redirect their attention to tasks that require higher concentration like school work, reading, crocheting, or traveling to a different location. These results highlight a relationship between doom-scrolling and productivity as well as self maintenance; the time participants spend on their phone seem to be an avoidance of productive tasks they feel required to complete.
The level of energy put into a task is related to current mental state
When facing the decision of completing tasks, participants often act based on their mood, or mental state. Participants often choose to hang out with friends, exercise, and engage in their hobbies—like painting, reading, dancing, etc.—when they feel great. On the other hand, they often choose to sleep, doom-scroll, or stay inside their homes when they are feeling bad. This suggests the direct impact mentality has on productivity.
Define
Problem Statement
Individuals who feel burdened by their daily productive tasks often choose to doom-scroll on their devices as a form of distraction. The doom-scrolling ends up occupying a majority of their time, which negatively impacts their wellness.
How Might We...
- How might we intercept users' daily habit of doom-scrolling?
- How might we inspire and empower users to perform tasks that feel burdening?
- How might we design app elements to keep the users interested in improving their well-being
Ideate
User Flow
We then mapped out the user flow, focusing on the onboarding process as well as for new users.
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Sketches
Based on the User Flow map we created, we sketched out some ideas for the app layout as well as for the brand character or pet that would be a selling point of the product. The three main procedures that we want our users to go through is clicking on the notification that pops up after doom-scrolling a certain amount of hours, the mood slider that will determine what tasks the user will participate in, and the main page where the user datas are tracked, like streak count, to-do list tasks, and screen time on different medias.
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Design
Prototype
Lo-fi Wireframes
We followed our layout sketches as well as our user flow to create the onboarding process and the process after follows after the pop-up notification.
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Branding
The app's branding is designed to evoke a sense of tranquility, peace, and subtle cuteness, leading us to select a monochrome indigo palette that avoids overwhelming users. Our message is focused on personal wellness and self-care while emphasizing that there is calmness to productivity.
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We used Literata as our header font and Mada as our body font to achieve readability as well as a classy feeling.
The goal of our brand character/pet is to serve as a guide to the user's journey to decrease doom-scrolling time. It is meant to evoke a sense of emotional support to the user with its helpful, lovable, and non-judgemental characteristics.
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The character is a devil, which became the origin of the name "Doom Devil," referring to a devil that comes to end the user's doom-scrolling time. Although it might be a mischievous creature at times, it's one and only desire is to help the user develop discipline.
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The bottom three designs were meant to be used for the mood scale, but were scraped because of time concerns.
Final Design Features
Entertaining Interactions
Rather than using the basic horizontal bar design to gauge user's mood, we chose to go with a squiggly scale to keep things more interesting.
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With the unique design, we hope to bring a sense of amusement to the users.
Streak Count
To motivate users to overcome their habit of doom-scrolling, we implemented a streak count feature that provides a sense of accomplishment whenever users complete a task designed to redirect their attention away from social media.
Meditation Bubble
If a user feels bad about their day, they will be presented with a bubble animation imitating the visuals of heartbeats. The meditation bubble is meant to give the user a moment of peace and relaxation to bring them into the present rather than being sucked into the black-hole of doom-scrolling.
Final Hi-fi Prototype
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Reflections
Feedback
Future Innovations
Bringing Doom Devil to life was a rewarding experience. As my most recent and developed UI/UX project, I had learned a lot from implementing a simple idea using the end-to-end product design cycle and working in a team with differing perspectives, as we had a team with both creative and technical background.
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Based on the feedback we received from the judges and our thinking, our next step would be to further develop the journey following the short questionnaire. Yes, answering the questions may pull the user away from their doom-scrolling for a moment, but it would be helpful to further that process by engaging the user through the activity that they choose.
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We could also provide small bubbles of feedback or encouraging statements based on their progress to allow their sense of accomplishment to grow beyond just seeing a streak.
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To provide better and improved user flow, we can research further about the affect of creating friction to interrupt user's doom-scrolling.
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Some improvements our team would also like to make are a smoother scroll bar, implementation of the Doom Devil's character emoticons as the scrolling icons, as well as better accessibility and visual hierarchy of the app design.
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