Bridge: Getting Back to Work after Social Media

Three questions to the project team

What was the particular challenge of the project from a UX point of view?
With all apps targeting social media, it's important to find a good balance of friction. If the intervention is too annoying, a user will probably get rid of it. Not annoying enough and a user will ignore it. I had to play around with the experience to find the right amount. My attempts included the intervention opening when a social media app is closed, in app nudges using overlays and many more. What I landed on is a notification every time a set app is closed, during set hours or a set location.

This decision was validated by a tester saying,

'It’s a tap that’s why it’s tolerable. If it was anything more than a couple of taps I’d have deleted it.”

This showed that it was the perfect amount of friction and the experience was right.

What was your personal highlight in the development process? Was there an aha!-moment, was there a low point?
The highlight came in the second round of testing. This was a multi-day test where I built a basic prototype and helped testers set it up on their phones. The idea was just to see whether people would use it across a couple of days. The data showed that 71% of them did.

What was even more meaningful was the insight that the testers that found the intervention useful had tried to limit their social media usage in some ways but had failed. The ones that succeeded in reducing social media usage or had never really made much of an effort did not find this to be too useful.

In my opinion, this was because the shortcomings of app blockers and traditional social media solutions worked for them and were not frustrating like they were for me.

Where do you see yourself and the project in the next five years?
Fixing the social media problem isn’t easy. That’s why, my goal for Bridge was to solve the problem for some people, some of the time. If I can do that, I feel like I’ve created value. To achieve this, Bridge is currently under development to be built and launched as a proper Android application. I hope to start this out as my first published application for Android and iOS. For the project, I hope that people continue to use it and find value in it. I hope that I can help people overcome their issues with social media with this and give them a tool to solve their problems. For myself, I hope to continue working in this space and creating things that help people control their technology instead of their technology controlling them.