Wellpaper
Year: 2021
Team: OnePlus
Role: Product Designer
Responsibility: Ideation Validation, Concept Design, Visual Design
WellPaper is a mobile app that displays your screen time and smartphone usage on a creative and dynamic wallpaper. WellPaper allows users to visualize and better understand their day-to-day smartphone habits in an aesthetic way right on the lock and home screens.
Background
Digital Wellbeing
Digital wellbeing has become a trending topic in recent years. OneLab wanted to build a solution to support people in understanding their daily usages, in a way of having their uniques, personalized wallpapers to express their identities.
Adults are spending so much time on their phone.
3.5
hours daily on average
There’s a massive disconnect with people’s actual screen time and what they think they use.
“I think I only do 15 minutes of Instagram a day, but when you look at the data it can tell a different story.”
Problems of the native Android digital wellbeing tool
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Buried in the settings and hard to find
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The static data is neither attractive to users nor can they represent how screen time usage changes across the day.
Challenge
What if we can shine a spotlight of the screen time, bring life to the static data and pull it up to the surface?
Visualizing your screen usage on your wallpaper to create a completely unique and completely personalized wallpaper
The Five Styles
Inspired by art works, design trends and nature.
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Glow: A cyberpunk design with six neon rings that get thicker when you are approaching the daily screen time target.
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Composition: Inspired by Piet Mondrian's painting "Composition No. II," this data-heavy design consists of a range of tiles that constantly scale based on app usage.
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Radial: A soft and smooth color gradient on a white canvas, for those who appreciate a minimal design style.
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Botanical garden: Inspired by Alex Katz's painting "Tulips 4," comes a relaxing flower design that lets users' digital wellbeing blossom.
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Cosmos: A dark-themed solar system design, this wallpaper features 6 planets that constantly scale based on your app usage.
Glow
Composition
Radial
Botanical garden
Cosmo
Challenge
Balance the battery drain and the feature of the wallpaper
Problem:
Battery consumption is a long-lasting issue for dynamic wallpapers. Depending on the framework of the phone, the live wallpapers will typically get redrawn around 120 times per second, and this kind of computational power kills batteries.
Solution:
We decided to reduce the number of redraws to control the battery consumption.
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The wallpaper will only be updated every time users unlock the phone, which means the wallpaper will stay static while users are using the phone.
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The more detail data like which app category each patterns represent will only be shown when users tap on specific parts of the wallpaper.
By doing so, these dynamic wallpapers’ battery drain is really close to a standard static wallpaper.
Define how the patterns evolve with the screen time
Problem:
We need to think about some edge cases to ensure the wallpapers will still looks good if users spend too much time on one specific app category and almost no time on the others.
Solution - 1
Using relevant usage instead of the actual usage to calculate the size of different patterns on the wallpaper.
Take “Composition” as an example:
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The size of the tiles (relevant to the screen size) represents the percentage of time spent on that category compared to the total screen time.
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A smallest size is set for each tile in order to make sure all the 6 tiles to be shown all the time.
Solution - 2
Ask users to set a daily limit for total screen time. The time limit will be used to calculate the higher limit of the thickness of the rings.
Take “Glow” as an example:
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Use one neon ring to represent a category. The ring gets thicker when user spends more time on that category.
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Users need to set a daily screen time target. The thickness of the rings represents how much percentage of the daily time limit is used.