Have you ever found yourself using your phone for no reason, scrolling and scrolling even though you’re exhausted?

It’s a fact that our relationship with our cellphones and the universe inside of them is complex and contradictory. Why aren’t we able to put our phones down if we have more important and interesting things to do?

Working adults have very little “me time” to feel nurtured and actually unwind. They associate this time with screen time because of how easy it is to just start scrolling despite the fact that they rarely find this time restful. Scrolling has become a synonym of resting nowadays.

For this project, our challenge was: How might we provide working adults, in their homes, during the evening, who want to do something else, a sense of closure to phone usage so that they can feel "done" and move on?

The solution is PausaBot. PausaBot is a WhatsApp bot that keeps friends accountable to their own needs of spending time off screen. The mechanism used to achieve impact is sending a text message when the user is most frequently "wasting time.” To activate the add-on, you’ll need to authorize a chat in which the bot can be nested. This means that it’s kind of a buddy system too. We discovered that timed and personalized text messages and the dynamics of responding to a friend were effective.

PausaBot was created using behavioral design strategies. The main hindering biases as part of the process were: Hassle Factor, Unit Bias, Status Quo Bias and Present Bias. 

On the other hand, we took advantage of the Social Proof Bias, because through our research we discovered that using the relationship between friends mitigates some of the negative emotions that come with being monitored and opens a door to humor and accountability. 

Nailing the right time, syncing with the user’s daily digital rhythm, giving context to the message and suggesting alternatives to users for them to jump to the next thing is why the experience, despite being very simple, can work.