Breaks – an Introduction

For this project, our team is tackling break time: specifically, how we can help people engage in activities that are restorative and energizing during their unstructured work/study breaks. It is now well-known that breaks are vital to several workflows, restoring one’s ability to do work in the short-term and preventing burnout in the long term. (Weir, 2019). From our literature review, however, we discovered how little is known about how best to optimize breaks for recovery (Weir, 2019; Demerouti et al. 2011). While there are a few beacons of knowledge, the space comprises largely of gaps, including the optimal frequency, length, and activity performed during breaks. Moreover, there is a high level of variability per individual in the type of break activity that actually achieves this restorative effect, depending on factors like personal preference, activity availability, and work type (Weir, 2019). 

What we were able to find out is as follows. Firstly, the importance of breaks overall– regardless of their contents–has been made clear. Furthermore, prior research provided a better understanding of what triggers breaks, different types of breaks, and, in the aggregate, which breaks tend to be more helpful, and which breaks may do more harm than good. But for us, that’s where the literature stopped providing answers. Our next step was to investigate how much of this knowledge had already been put into practice. So, we performed a comparative analysis to see what solutions exist in this market space.

App Deep-Dives

Calm

Description 

Calm is a meditation and sleep application. It has guided meditations, calming white noises, as well as, human-narrated stories designed to put someone to sleep. The meditation exercises range in intensity and length. A meditation exercise can be a minute-long breathing exercise or a multi-day multi-hour meditation session focusing on a single emotion. On the sleep side, they also provide a plethora of products from podcasts and sleep stories to relaxing music and sleep-focused meditations.

 

The app opens to a scenic background and the sounds of birds chirping. Users are greeted with recommended content based on their preferences. Content is broken down into multiple categories to help user find the content they would like to consume. As the user begins to consume the content, the screen turns dark with no distractions on it. This gives the user an immersive experience and allows them to focus on the task of meditation and relaxing without worrying about the next activity.

 

 

Target Users

• People interested in spending in their break time less wastefully
• People interested in meditation and mindfulness
• People interested in having better sleep
• People willing to spend 70$ a year to improve their meditation

Features

• Guided meditation sessions taught by professionals and ranked baised on reviews
• Inspiring podcasts designed to give people energy while moving and customized to give somewhat personalized feedback. 
• Open Ended meditations with relaxing sounds and no timer
• Sleep stories that help someone relax after a long day through relaxing content and quiet voices. 
• Relaxing music and white noise
• Daily Check-in with mood history
• Insights from app usage about mental health and ways to improve
• Reminder to nudge users to be more proactive about their mindfulness

Pros 

• New and engaging content that gives users the opportunity to try different exercises 
• Recommendation algorithm based on user preferences, time of day, and wanted activity
• Certified professionals giving guided meditations and the sleep stories
• A research-based approach to understand user preferences and align content to better suit them. 
• App design with calming views and relaxing bird noises to attract users to come back to the home screen. 

Cons

• Content is locked behind paywalls
• Expensive at 70$ a year
• Content not customizable to individual’s preferences
• Difficult to find the right content with an instructor match
• Requires high activation energy to open the app and engage in activities truthfully
• No social aspect to give you accountability

 

Duolingo

Like Calm, Duolingo nudges users to create a new habit. However, instead of pushing them to meditate, Duolingo pushes them to learn or master a language. It uses similar techniques to Calm where it reminds the users every day to start a small habit of learning. It also provides new content along with badges and rewards to keep user engaged and motivated. Moreover, it is motivated by language learning research to create a fast-paced learning environment that does not require a lot of time.

 

However, Duolingo requires a high amount of activation energy to constantly engage with the platform. This is due to the fact that it still requires system 2 brain activity along with memorization and memory retrieval. Furthermore, there is very minimal social interaction or accountability built into the application which reduces overall prompts to the user. Finally, the learning style and learning content is not customizable to someone’s needs or interests. Instead, the lessons are structured one way to fit everyone’s different learning habits.

 

Samsung Health / Apple Health

Description

Health applications live on almost every smartphone. They ambiently measure activity, sleep, and much more. People actively use them to reach their fitness goals whether that is walking 6000 steps, “filling the circles”, or monitoring caloric intake. These apps are designed by the smartphone manufacturer and have direct access to sensor data to monitor behavior. Moreover, they nudge their users to be more active by sending them notifications or showing them how close or far they are from achieving their goals. Furthermore, they can track things like the number of water cups drank in a day and caffeine intake while nudging users to reach their respective goals.

 

 

When attached to a smart watch, they can more accurately measure activity as well as track biological measurements such as heart rate, oxygen levels, etc.

 

Forest

Description

Forest is an app that helps you enforce cycles of breaks and productivity, fueled by the prospect of “growing” your own digital tree. As you start a productivity/study session (with a self-defined duration), you’re shown a new seed that slowly grows into a tree. If you make it to the end of your session without switching apps or checking notifications, then congrats! You’re rewarded by a fully grown tree, which gets added to your own personal forest. Over time, your forest grows and grows, giving yourself a tangible measure of what you’ve accomplished.

 

 

What’s especially useful about Forest is the wide variety of incentives used. Firstly, the forest that grows as you go through productivity cycles really is novel, and acts as a visual motivator to stick to your habits. This demonstrates the efficacy of a visual incentive–with an added element of continuity–in nudging people to reject unhealthy habits, such as compulsive phone-checking. Another fascinating feature is the mechanism where your forest disappears if it hasn’t been tended to in a while, which prompts you to come back and use the app regularly. One potential fallback with this as with many “streak” based apps, you run the risk of the user accidentally breaking their streak, and losing motivation to continue using the app.

There is also a humanitarian incentive, which allows users to spend their coins earned from successful study sessions toward planting a real life tree, in partnership with a non-profit organization.

 

Lastly, a relatively new social feature was added to Forest that taps into social pressures to conform. Now, multiple people can start a productivity session together, and if any one person “fails” by picking up their phone, everybody’s tree withers.

 

This evidence on effective incentives will inform our eventual solution, as we begin ideating for the best way(s) to motivate our users.

 

Study Break!

Description

Study Break! is a social app that syncs friends’ calendars and identifies common free time. Users create a personal calendar by plugging in their weekly class schedule, plus extra times they plan on studying, and then share it with their friends. Then, Study Break! automatically pinpoints the times when users share free time with their friends. The app also comes with messaging features users can coordinate meetups with friends as the shared study break approaches.

 

This app provides a streamlined process of organizing social gatherings with friends. Specifically, we thought this feature was especially useful for promoting healthy, restorative breaks, as it makes it much easier to incorporate social time into shorter, intermittent breaks. However, the usability of this app could be improved with a feature to automatically sync to user’s pre-existing Google Calendars or iCalendars, rather than having to tediously re-input their schedule into another app. It also operates under a dangerous assumption that people schedule their study times, whereas we have observed from our user research that the majority of people do not do this.

 

Putting it all together – Comparative Matrix

Our goal is to help people spend their breaks more meaningfully. As we studied other apps that either prompt people to take breaks, give people things to do during breaks, or make sure people stay accountable during their breaks, we quickly saw a pattern emerging. Some apps were easier to launch and use than others. Additionally, some apps provided more “recovery” than others. The term recovery comes from our literature review, but in short, it’s a way to gauge how much an activity either fills or drains someone, and how prepared that refreshed that person is going into the rest of their day. We think the goal of a meaningful break is one that has a high recovery. 

We can plot these patterns on a two by two! The x-axis is a measure of the “activation energy” required to use an app (i.e it takes much more effort to start a Duolingo review session than just opening up Tiktok and start scrolling). The y-axis plots the aforementioned recovery – how refreshed does someone feel after using an app. Then, we got to work plotting our deep dives. Apps that give you things to do, like Calm and Duolingo, tend to have higher recovery, but also have a higher barrier to use. For example, rarely to people open Calm when they have 5-10 minutes between classes. Apps like TikTok are the polar opposite. They have very low activation energy – it’s hard to NOT open it. But, they have low recovery, often leaving people more drained after using it, usually with an accompanying feeling of “what did I actually take away from scrolling through TikTok.” The rest of our deep dives are scattered around the high-activation energy, low recovery quadrant – they’re definitely useful, but aren’t too effective on their own. Forest prompts you to take a break, but it’s really up to you how you spend it. 

Finally, the fairly visual takeaway – there’s a lack of apps we found in that first quadrant of high recovery, yet low activation energy. Next, we’ll start to synthesize these deep dives with our baseline study and see if that takeaway still holds – is there really no app that facilitates high recovery, but is easy to use? Have people found ways to do this themselves?