Today we’re introducing a simpler and clearer way to track your screen time and improve your focus. Straight in the Opal app. Check it out!
October 23, 2023
Opal’ mission is to empower humans to focus better every day. Today we’re introducing a simpler and clearer way to track your screen time and improve your focus.
Straight in the Opal app. Check it out!
PS if you don’t see the new Opal home, don’t forgot to update your Opal app!
Over the last 3 years, we’ve released more than 170 versions of our app on the App Store, usually every Monday. Each time we're looking for opportunities to advance our mission, which is to help humans focus better every day in this constantly connected world.
We've been thrilled by the response to Opal's Home Screen, which is where an important Opal feature lives: Focus Score®. Focus Score® helps you check your focus level at any point throughout the day. It uses live data from your phone’s activity to measure your focus automatically, and to give you the power to change and improve your focus. Private and secure by design, Focus Score® analyses your pickups, notifications, and time spent on different apps and websites to give you the best picture of your focus.
Many of you have been using this feature daily, and we've received feedback from hundreds on you, notably on the community forum, about improvements to make to it. Over the last year, Peter and I spent many hours catching up to the feedback individually and adding new apps to customise, but we want to find a more scalable way to allow for this customisation.
Many of you also told us that the feature was too complex and hard to read. That you found the idea useful, but just couldn't understand how it worked.
So we decided to make the Opal Home simpler and clearer.
Matt then suggested we try a cleaner way to visualise the score on the Home, with a simple hourly bar chart. He built it, we tested it internally and with a few dozen gems, we liked it and we decided to go for it. Anton built some design concepts and iterated with me and Antoine, and the team went to work to release.
One of the things we believe in as a team is that screen time is the new diet.
Just like there is good food and bad food, and good food for some people, and bad food for others, not all Screen Time is equal, and it is deeply personal.
For screen time, it really depends on your age and mental health condition, context like time of day, your location, whether you’re alone or with others, your job and also personality and preferences.
If you want to measure the quality of your focus and your screen time, you need customisation. We needed to make Screen Time personal so it can work for you.
This still isn't obvious to most people. Apple and Google introduced Screen Time has an overall number to look at and for most people, it's the only thing to measure.
We needed to create a design for the Opal Home that you can understand if you only want to read your overall screen time, but we wanted to take you to experience a different concept - Focus Score®, where you can visualise the quality of your screen time (good/bad) and make decisions on what helps or hurts your focus.
So here’s what we’ve done
We created a simpler and clearer way to track your screen time and improve your focus daily.
Immediately when you open opal you can see your screen time for today and Focus Score as a percentage. You will also see your pick ups up to now.
Pickups: the number of times you picked up your phone up to now
Focus Score: the percentage of your day where you're not using distracting apps
A new bar chart below showing you how you spent each hour of your day.
🟢 Your gem colour shows positive focus time: when you’re offline or on productive apps
🔴 Red represents the time you spend on distracting apps that erode your focus
In this way you can always see how focused you are throughout the day.
If you scroll down you can see in detail what your phone usage was like today, with a specific breakdown by app and website.
You can even scrub the chart to go to a specific hour of the day, and zoom in on your score, pickups, screen time and detailed usage for that hour.
You can tap on any app and edit wether you think this app is Productive or Distracting. Hit Save, and your score and chart will update.
Productive: Apps that help your Focus
Distracting: Apps that hurt your Focus.
Neutral: Apps that neither hurt not help your focus. They are not counted towards your screen time. You can use this for example for apps you use in the background like Google Maps or audio like Spotify.
It's up to you to decide!
That’s it - hopefully this will allow you to make Screen Time work for you, help you better measure your focus and the quality of your screen time every day, making decisions on what improves or hurt your focus, to you can make progress and focus better each day.
And one more thing - you might have noticed the beautiful gems on the Home Screen, of course it’s an Opal. If you go to your profile you’ll see you can unlock these stunning gems - we can them MileStones - when you make progress in the app. Check it out.
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