Is Forest helping you stay focus? (iOS)
What is Forest ?
Forest is an application that helps you temporarily put down your phone and stay focused on what is more important in real life. Its primary function is to stop you from getting distracted by the phone, to make you self-motivated and to get more things done.
Product Thinking
Forest's target user
What primary problem Forest is trying to solve?
Help stay focused on important things in life whenever and wherever.
Anyone who’s goal is to be more in the moment, ignore the phone, and actually focus on works.
What is the core value proposition?
Stay focused, be present.
Product Walkthrough
Think about a scenario: you are working on presentation practice and wanting to stay focused for the next 15 minutes without distracting by your phone.
You open Forest, it presents an eye-catching graphic in the middle of the home screen with a time-like number nested below.
You tap the graphic, it pops up a box saying “Select Species”. It emphasizes the trees in the first line with a brighter color, others are dark look. You tab the first bright one, and it directs to the homepage.
You then press the green dot and swipe clockwise, you can easily see the time-like number changing as you move your fingers. The range of focused time varies from 10 to 120 minutes. You set up a time for 15, and tab “Plant” button. The countdown starts…
You finish your practice talk around 10 minutes. You grab your phone and want to give up the last few minutes, however, you see your plant is growing. You then decide to stick to the end.
On the below page, I have included 3 screenshots of the countdown page. The difference among these pictures is the slogan and the status of the plant. It offers you different text and appearance along with time. The changing slogan would encourage users to stay focused and put down their phones, and the different statuses of the plant would tell users that their plant is growing, so don’t give up.
The changing slogan and status of the plant help improve the personalized experience for users and encourage them to stay focused more.
In sum, the purpose of this product is clearly conveyed, using gamification to help users stay focused and away from the phone. The eye-catching graphic, the large size of time, and the main plant button on the homepage with proper structure offer excellent ease of use and motivate users to achieve their goal. The overall flow is smooth and straightforward. It does help stay focused.
Interaction Design
Tap: choose your favorite tree.
Press to swipe: choose your desired time.
Tap to start, to play music, to give up.
Smooth interactions for users to reach out to their purpose.
UI Design
The overall interface looks consistent; its primary color is green, which promotes brand identity and strengthens its purpose: plant a tree.
Forest does not have a significant visual hierarchy, it uses white color to contrast with a green background, and different sizes of text to emphasize the importance of the content.
In brief, its interface is clean and offers ease of use.
The Hamburger menu has been applied on most mobile applications, and it is a typical UI pattern. That's why the Forest navigation bar is easy to identify and use.
Eye-catching graphic
Using larger sizes to represent time
The only button to inform action
Its icon style looks consistent, and with texts to inform users of the functionality. It follows one of the Nielson 10 usability heuristics: recognition rather than recall.
What else is special about Forest?
Plant real trees
Forest allows users to plant real trees in East and West Africa with costing coins in this “stay focused” game. The only way to collect coins is to plant a virtual tree, stay focused, and put down your phone. Every ten minutes would only collect 4 coins, so it would take a long time to collect 2,500 coins to plant a real tree. Considering planting a real tree in the world as a reward, most users would think about spending more time to stay focused on achieving this goal.
Every user can plant 5 trees maximum.
Planting a real tree costs 2,500 coins.
The number of real trees that have been planted by users.
Play with friends
Forest allows users to play this game with friends. It plays on a supervisor role for all players. Once users start playing, the withering of one person’s tree will cause the withering of everyone else’s trees. Thus, it forces users to stay focused to some extent while playing with friends.
Play together
Start staying focus
Offer more personality experience
Forest allows users to shop at the store for buying different plants and, of course, using coins that users earned from the game. Forest offers plenty of options for different plants with different prices, and users could trade off according to their preferences. Users would try to make more coins to buy their favorite plants so that they would reach out to the purpose of the game.
Unlock more plants based on preference
What can be improved for Forest?
More possible motivation options
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The current motivation approach is to show the encouraging slogan, such as "stopping phubbing" and "put down your phone," and to tell users the tree would otherwise wither. However, some users might want to consistently check how much time left in the clock on the screen, which is still a form of "being distracted." Therefore, the countdown and the slogan along might not be enough for helping users to stay focused. One possible solution that might alleviate this issue could be: whenever users check the time, a small extra amount of focused time could be added on the screen. This could help users focus on their work instead of wondering how much time left on the screen.
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Besides, one account on Forest can only plant 5 tree maximum. If users reach out to its limitation and want to keep using this app, does this mean that there is no enough motivation for users to use this application anymore? Therefore, Forest should provide more possible motivation options for users.
Learning experience design
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Currently, the Forest helps users to stay focused on a one-way strategy where users set up a clock and the app uses motivations to encourage users to stay away from their phones. However, user behaviors are different from person to person, and even the same person's behavior varies at a different time. Providing a personal learning experience for users might help users to understand themselves better (e.g., what time during a day/a week a user is easier to focus on work? Are they less likely to be distracted during compare to the first day they start using the app? What possible strategies they could try to improve?).
Accessibility
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I used the WAVE to check the color contrast for Forest. It indicates that the white text has a lower color contrast for its green background. Even though its menu follows one of usability heuristics, the color contrast on the menu is not very user-friendly for people with visual disabilities. Forest should improve its accessibility for user-friendly.
Forest is an useful tool for me
Forest is one of the applications that I usually use in my daily life. The primary purpose of using it is to stop me from wasting time on my phone during work. I have to acknowledge that I am a little bit addicted to my phone, which takes lots of time of mine. Since I started using Forest, I can put down my phone and stay focused on my works. I think it is because of the gamification of this application, making me want to use it to do more meaningful things, like being away from the phone, planting a real tree, and earning my favorite plants in the game. Forest is a useful tool for me, and it does help me stay focused.
If you are one of the people below, let Forest help you stay focused !
image from: https://www.forestapp.cc/
