Catena: Pomodoro and Focus Timer

Your cozy cat cafe runs on your focus time
Set your focus time and tag your subject
Stay focused while Maple cooks
Every session earns ingredients and coins
Cook dishes with what you earned
Cats visit as you feed them more, decorate and focus
Serve your cats their favorite dishes
Decorate your cafe your way
Meet every cat and collect them all
Spend coins on new decor
Climb the weekly leaderboard, join focus groups, and study together with friends
See where your focus time goes (Catena Pro)
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Inspiration

All of us have used Pomodoro apps on and off since we were about thirteen. The experience was always the same: start a timer, wait for it to end, repeat. The apps helped while we used them, but we kept running into the same problem. We would forget about the method, and nothing gave us a solid reason to come back.

Building the habit of using a focus app takes grit. Even starting the tool meant to help us focus required its own effort. Our preliminary research suggested we were not alone. In an exploratory questionnaire of 61 students, 40 said they struggled to focus often or always. Forgetting about an app and losing interest were the most common reasons people stopped using one.

So we thought about the games we loved returning to: worlds where we could decorate a space, discover something new, and build relationships with characters. We also love cats, baked goods, and cafés. Catena grew from bringing those interests together.

We wanted starting a focus session to feel like returning somewhere welcoming. Somewhere your effort becomes a meal for a favorite cat, a new recipe, or a little corner of a café that feels like yours.

What it does

Catena is a cozy Pomodoro and focus timer where studying helps you grow your own cat café.

Focus, cook, and connect. Complete a timed session or use an open stopwatch to earn coins and ingredients. Discover recipes, cook at the oven or coffee machine, decorate your café, and serve dishes to visiting cats. Feeding cats their favorite foods builds relationships, and milestone letters give you small moments of connection to look forward to.

A receipt for your effort. Each session ends with a café receipt, accompanied by a receipt-printer sound, showing what you earned. It also invites you to record your mood and an optional journal note. An interrupted session receives a receipt marked "Closed Early," with the same opportunity to reflect.

Room for rest. Breaks earn rewards, and repeated feeding brings diminishing relationship gains. These mechanics are designed to encourage sustainable pacing. Mood tracking makes space to consider how studying feels alongside how much time you spend.

Company without extra setup. A host can share a study-room link, and friends can join from a browser as temporary guests without installing the app. Study groups give people a shared place to focus alongside others and see each other's progress. Optional app blocking helps users manage distractions, and anyone who prefers less competition can opt out of appearing on the global leaderboard.

Throughout Catena, illustration, animation, and sound make progress tangible and everyday actions satisfying.

How we built it

We developed Catena through Figma prototypes, student interviews, questionnaires, and reviews of existing apps. We studied how Forest makes progress visible, how Focus Friend creates attachment through companionship, and how Finch combines care, characters, and randomized rewards to encourage a return.

We built the app with React Native and Expo, using Firebase for backend services. Native iOS integrations support features such as app blocking, widgets, and Live Activities. Session persistence helps protect completed focus sessions when syncing is interrupted.

We treated every screen as part of the café experience. Account screens, leaderboards, the timer, selection screens, and popups received deliberate attention to their layout, wording, and visual hierarchy. A shared design system connects them through consistent colors, typography, spacing, and components.

Warm cream surfaces and dark brown text form the foundation, with apricot, sage, and blush used deliberately for accents and feedback. Pencil-sketched borders give cards and popups a handmade quality while preserving clear shapes and readable content. We carefully considered color placement and contrast so the illustrated world could feel expressive without becoming overwhelming.

The artwork is hand-drawn, with hundreds of animation frames across the cats and café interactions. The cats draw inspiration from the Boston community around us. We commissioned music and sound effects from fellow students at Berklee, supporting student creatives while developing an atmosphere specific to Catena.

We invite judges to pay particular attention to these design details:

The timer and selection screens: An animated cat brings personality to the start button, while a clear hierarchy helps users choose a session and begin focusing.
Session receipts: The café metaphor carries through to an itemized record of effort, mood, and reflection. "Closed Early" gives interrupted sessions a place in that same visual story.
Furniture placement: Available slots are highlighted, and placement states show where furniture can go or be swapped. The view moves to an available slot, helping users find spaces that might otherwise be difficult to locate.
Finding and feeding cats: Selecting a cat brings the view to its location. Cats lift as a dish is dragged over them, identifying the feeding target. Eating animations, hearts for favorite dishes, and sound effects make the result clear and satisfying.
Everyday screens and guidance: Account screens, leaderboards, popups, and contextual hints carry the same visual language. Short prompts in Maple's voice guide first interactions close to the object the user needs.

These details answer practical questions through the experience itself: Where can this furniture go? Where is my cat? Which cat am I feeding? Motion and visual feedback help users understand the café while making it feel alive.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was creating a detailed, expressive world that remained easy to navigate. Cats, furniture, food, and controls share a limited screen. We had to decide what should attract attention and when the app should guide someone toward an action or location.

Furniture placement made this especially clear. Each decoration needed consistent sizing and placement rules to work within the café. Testing artwork inside the app helped us refine how assets fit together, while highlighted slots and guided movement made placement easier to understand.

Balancing motivation with rest was another challenge. Rewards give people a reason to return, but they can also create pressure to keep going. We tuned cat visitation and feeding mechanics to encourage returning over time and discourage repetitive grinding.

We also reconsidered how the app responds when focusing does not go as planned. Conversations with a UI designer at Apple helped us pay closer attention to wording. We replaced failure language with "Closed Early" and included mood reflection after both completed and interrupted sessions.

Across these decisions, we kept asking how Catena could encourage someone without making them feel pressured.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of creating a cohesive experience through original artwork, thoughtful interactions, and music commissioned from our student community.

That care appears throughout Catena: in the café's colors, the pencil-sketched borders, the wording on a receipt, the movement that helps someone find a cat, and the animation and sound that make feeding satisfying.

We are also proud of designing around the difficulties that motivated this project. Quick-start options reduce the steps needed to begin. Optional app blocking supports users who want help managing distractions. Browser-based study rooms let friends join without installing anything. Gentle language and mood reflection make room for sessions that do not go as planned.

Our closed beta brought together 71 users and reached 42.7% retention at three weeks. This is an early result from a small cohort, but it gave us an encouraging signal that people were returning. More than 300 people have also joined the waitlist.

We are continuing to learn whether and how Catena helps people build sustainable study habits. Seeing users return to a world we created together has been a meaningful start.

What we learned

Building Catena taught us how much focus matters in the app-building process itself. We initially started developing features before clearly defining the core problem. This stretched out development and meant spending time on features we eventually cut.

Going forward, we would conduct user interviews and product research much earlier. Understanding people's needs before committing to a solution helps us decide what deserves to be built, rather than relying on what we assume people want.

We also learned the importance of aligning as a team while balancing development with busy student schedules. Agreeing on priorities, scope, and intended interactions earlier would have helped us use our time more effectively.

Working with original artwork taught us that art and engineering need to develop together. Café fixtures needed aligned layers, decorations required shared sizing rules, and assets had to be tested inside the app throughout the design process.

Finally, we learned how small design decisions shape the experience. Animation can clarify which cat is being fed. Color can make an available slot easier to find. A single phrase on a receipt can make returning after an interrupted session feel more welcoming.

What's next for Catena: Pomodoro and Focus Timer

We plan to continue improving onboarding, refining shared study experiences, and making the app easier to navigate through community feedback. We also want to grow Catena's presence across app stores so more people can find their way into the café.

We will expand the world with more cats to befriend, recipes to discover, and special additions that give users something new to look forward to. We also hope to continue collaborating with student artists and musicians.

As Catena grows, we want to preserve the care behind its design: clear interactions, original art, thoughtful sound, and a welcoming place to return to when focusing feels hard.