Phone Time

Description

The hardest part of this assignment was trying to decide on what habit or activity I wanted to track. I decided to go with tracking my phone usage because iPhones have the Screentime feature. This feature tracks how long you are using each app. I thought this was helpful because it wouldn’t require me to tally or be hyper-focused on what I do on my phone. This was important because I didn’t want to sway any of my habits. I wanted to see the raw numbers without any intervention.

Design Process

At first I couldn’t decide on what data to use because I wasn’t sure how they’d be displayed on the page. I almost wanted to think through what the visual will be before coming up with the data… clearly that wouldn’t work out.

Here are a few of the ideas I had:

1. Amount of steps per day – visual includes someone walking back and forth on the canvas, each back and forth representing a day

2. Gradient phone screentime – the entire canvas would have colors associated with each category (ie. Productivity, entertainment, and social media). Every day has a different percentage of categories, so the gradient would gradually change with the day. I worked through this for most of the Thanksgiving break, however I couldn’t find how to do this using lerpColor() and with 3+ colors.

The gradient idea is still one that I’d like to try, but after working out the code and struggling with it, I decided to go a bit easier by creating a graph for these gradients first. Often times, what I want to do with the visuals doesn’t match up with my current skills in code. For this reason, it’s important for me to start out with the basics and add on gradually. Gradient is the next step.

Reflection

1. What did you learn through self-tracking?

When I originally decided on using Screentime, I wanted it to be a true reflection of my phone usage. What I learned, however, is that because this assignment fell on Thanksgiving week, much of the data that I pulled doesn’t reflect my normal day-to-day. It’s a reflection for this week, but will want to pull even more data over a longer period of time to better understand my usage while working, being in school, etc.

2. What was gained/lost through this process to visualize the data?

At least for me, much of my creativity is lost when I have to code. My coding skills are not up-to-par with my design skill so I find myself often biting off more than I can chew. Because of that, much of the visual design is lost.