PRID8411 Summative: Interaction Design
A time and life-management app for Gen Z emerging adults, built on the premise that by the time someone needs it, they no longer have the willpower to set it up.
Role
UX/UI Designer & Researcher
Program
Postgrad Diploma, UI/UX, Vega School
Tools & Methods
Figma · Fogg's Behaviour Model · Eyal's Hook Model · Self-Determination Theory
Project Context
Function is built for a specific, narrow window: emerging adulthood, the stretch between 18 and 25 where full independence arrives before anyone is actually prepared for it. First apartments, unassisted finances, early-career deadlines and higher education all land at once, and the parental oversight and supervised routines that used to organise daily life are simply gone.
The Problem
The design-relevant insight isn't that this user lacks ambition; it's that they lack established cognitive schemas. Registering with a GP, understanding a tax return, working out what to buy at a supermarket: tasks an experienced adult handles automatically require active problem-solving the first time you do them, and that cognitive cost is real and cumulative. A blank task manager fails this user precisely because it presupposes they've already solved the organisational problem — that they know what to put in it.
The Approach
What this demographic actually needs is a system that can receive unorganised cognitive output and convert it into something actionable, without requiring the user to structure their own thoughts first. So Function inverts the usual order: it doesn't ask for a plan, it asks for a mess, a lock-screen notification rather than an app icon they have to remember exists, and asks one question: what's causing overwhelm right now? Everything else, sorting that mess into Academic & Focus Anchors, Living Space Logistics, and Foundational Well-Being, happens automatically, after the fact.
Two Frameworks, Two Timescales
The engagement architecture runs on two frameworks operating at different scales. Eyal's Hook Model (2014) provides the longitudinal structure, a repeating Trigger, Action, Variable Reward, Investment cycle designed to gradually shift engagement from external prompts to internalised habit, while Fogg's Behaviour Model (2009) operates at the level of a single interaction, ensuring that when a trigger fires, the required effort is low enough that the user's depleted state doesn't become the obstacle. One model prevents dropout over weeks; the other prevents abandonment in the moment, and each failure mode needed its own design response rather than a single generic 'make it easy' principle.
Design Decisions
What's actually going on
An external trigger, not an app icon
The prompt fires as a system notification at 23:14, the exact point identified in the user research as the gateway to late-night doomscrolling, intercepted before the scroll loop starts. It has to out-compete the phone's own notification stack on its own terms, so the copy is deliberately concrete and low-cost: "Take 2 minutes to clear your mind and anchor your day" names a specific time commitment instead of an open-ended one, and a single inline "Open Function" button removes the step of finding the app in a drawer, keeping Ability at its highest exactly when Prompt fires.
Zero-configuration capture
The home dashboard is defined as much by its absences as its features: no scheduling matrix, no category selector, no priority flags, no multi-step input flow. Just one open text field under "What's causing overwhelm right now? Dump everything here." Each missing element represents a cognitive demand the interface has absorbed on the user's behalf, grounded directly in Sweller's Cognitive Load Theory (1988), and the Holistic Balance tracker beneath it deliberately opens at 20 out of 100 rather than zero, exploiting the Zeigarnik Effect so a partially filled state pulls toward completion an empty one never does.
"Deconstruct": progressive disclosure with a point of view
The unsorted brain dump is only reorganised into Living Space Logistics, Academic & Focus Anchors and Foundational Well-Being after the simplest possible input has already been accepted, protecting working memory at the moment of highest cognitive depletion. The ordering isn't neutral either: physical and domestic tasks are placed ahead of academic ones, a direct structural encoding of Maslow's hierarchy operationalised in the UI. That's a claim about what a productive day actually requires, made through layout rather than stated in copy, and it's the one decision in the app I'd defend hardest.
Two motivational registers, not one
Academic and financial tasks carry visible "Due" and "Today" urgency badges where real external consequences justify the pressure; self-care and domestic tasks carry none, because the intrinsic motivation for those behaviours is meant to stay autonomous rather than have artificial urgency grafted onto it. It's a small distinction, but it's the difference between a system that respects Self-Determination Theory's autonomy principle and one that just gamifies everything because gamification is available.
A reward that closes the loop instead of extending it
"Equilibrium Met" fires on Skinner's variable ratio schedule once a user balances at least one academic or financial task with one self-care task, never predictably, and never for a broken streak, because a fixed reinforcement schedule fails this demographic: when the streak breaks after a rough week, a hard reset doesn't motivate a return, it confirms the story the user was already telling themselves about their own inability to sustain anything. The unlock is a private aesthetic theme, never a score or leaderboard, a deliberate exclusion of the relatedness need, since peer-comparison dynamics in this age group are directly linked to burnout.
Designed to be walked away from
Completing the evening check-in surfaces a hard terminal state, "Clear the slate" leading to "You're done for today," that closes the gamified layer entirely until morning. This is the part of the ethics section I take most seriously: Function runs the same psychological mechanisms as the platforms it's trying to pull people out of, and applying variable ratio reinforcement to a user already under strain is a genuine risk, not a stylistic flourish. The only honest defence is where the loop is built to terminate: the reward ends in a cooked meal or a submitted assignment, not more screen time. Discouraging re-engagement on purpose is unusual, and it's also the only architecturally consistent response to an attention economy the app is explicitly trying to help its users resist.
The Work
Screens & process
Takeaway
Every interface decision in Function is footnoted back to a named behavioural model (Eyal, Fogg, Sweller, Nicholson, Deci & Ryan) rather than a stylistic preference, and the ethics section doesn't let itself off the hook: it argues that there's no design-neutral version of what this app does, that it deploys the same manipulation mechanics as the platforms it's trying to pull people out of, and that calling it empowerment rather than exploitation is only defensible because the safeguards are built into the architecture, not stated in a privacy policy and absent from the code. It's the project I point to when someone asks whether I design from taste or from research.