Increasing Digital Wellbeing in the Age of Doomscrolling
Prioritizing the Good
Parcel is a social media app concept that interrupts the familiar UI design element of the infinite scroll, which enables social media addiction, information overload, and detrimental doomscrolling.
Parcel’s design prioritizes the joy of online connection, sharing, and communication by offering an alternative to the infinite scroll.
My Role
• Conducted survey & interviews
• Synthesized data
• Ideated & wireframed solutions
• Developed visual design & logo
• Created hi-fi clickable prototype
Tools
• Figma
• Miro
• Adobe CC
• Google Workspace
• Social Media
Primary Research
Survey
24 participants
I conducted a survey on Instagram asking two open-ended questions: “worst part of being online?” and “best part of being online?”
In 24 hours I received 24 responses. A few of the responses that informed my design process were:
Worst part of being online?
“The feeling of losing consciousness after hours of obsessive scrolling”
“Taking in everyone’s thoughts constantly”
“Feeling funnelled around and having no control”
“the ads, the pressure to buy/sell, grind culture, fake beauty standards, lack of boundaries”
“The noise seeping in everywhere”
Best part of being online?
“talking to the sweetest people!! sharing joy!”
“The aesthetics and connections u can make”
“Connecting with others”
“sharing new, old, small, and big memories”
“Accessing the <<good>> spaces/ finding accounts where I encounter beauty”
“togetherness”
Interviews
2 participants
I identified 3 major themes from the interview data:
Addiction
Passivity
Communication
Secondary Research
“There’s a hunger for media formats that feel more considerate, more consentful, and designed with care. It’s absolutely crucial for our safety and our wellbeing” (Virdee, 2020).
This quote from Kawandeep Virdee phrases my intention for this design project well.
Ideation
Pencil and paper sketches helped me synthesize the data generated from survey and interviews, and create a rough idea of the UI
Wireframing
I created wireframes to test the flow of essential tasks.
I distilled the research data into 3 major conclusions about the nature of social media apps and their usage:
1. Currently popular social media apps are addictive & damaging to wellbeing
2. These apps foster a passive & unfulfilling method of interaction
3. There is joy to be had through meaningful communication on social media apps.
Lessons Learned
• Consider product strategy: Parcel needs to offer a possible future. I hope that through conscious differentiation from existing social media apps, Parcel can offer a different kind of social media to people who are, exhausted by the current social media app landscape