Week 3 Similar Projects HabitLab

HabitLab

https://habitlab.stanford.edu/

HabitLab is a project built by the Stanford University aimed at curbing the amount of time you spend on certain apps on your Phone and in the Browser.

It's broken down in three steps:

• Pick sites you want to spend less time on
• HabitLab then tries a set of interventions, (popups, windows embedded in facebook, overlays on youtube) to persuade the user to stop using the particular platform ("hey this video is 23m long, you only have 5m left for today, do you want to wait till tomorrow".
• Finally you can view your progress with the app and see what interventions were more successful.

It's really well thought out and executed and wins over some other applications which to just blindly put down a time limit for a particular app (instagram) of 25m per day and lock you out regardless.

Issues

• The downside is it's only Android based as it uses an overlay system which is not allowed on iOS.
• The other downside is it requires access to the content being viewed (which is understandable considering what it's trying to do) which is another thing that will probably be frowned upon in the App Store approval process.

What could be improved is with access to the data it has why not also flag what is being shared especially location information, maybe via a dialog before the action is taken. Although this veers from the original mission statement.