Drift

Inspiration

A minute can feel like everything or nothing at all. You’ve felt it. Sixty seconds holding a plank can stretch into what feels like an entire lifetime, yet an hour with friends disappears before you’ve even noticed it began. A long lecture can drag like a ten-hour shift. A weekend trip can vanish in a blink. The clock never changes its pace, just our perception of it. Today, we track almost everything about ourselves. Heart rate, breathing, sleep cycles, blood oxygen. We quantify our bodies in remarkable detail. And yet, when it comes to time, we still measure it in a single, rigid dimension. But lived time isn’t rigid. It expands and contracts and warps. We became obsessed with a simple question: what’s happening in the gap between clock time and felt time? That invisible space between the minute that passes and the minute you experience. And the more we looked at it, the more we realized that that gap might be one of the most honest signals the body produces. A direct reflection of cognitive load, emotional state, engagement, fatigue, and presence. So we decided to build something that could read it: Drift.

What it does

Drift tracks temporal perception, the difference between clock time and felt time, and uses it to map your cognitive states across the day. We track four states: Flow, where time compresses and output peaks. Presence, where time runs accurately and steadily. Drag, where time expands to feel heavier and longer. Warp, where time dissolves, and your judgment quietly falls apart.

We are leaving the core mechanic to be invented in the future, hopefully :)

The interface is an aurora field, vertical light curtains that encode your felt states atmospherically rather than graphically. Deliberately not a waveform, not a chart, nothing that looks like a tracker. Below it, a data layer gives you the structured read when you want it. The two layers coexist without either one cancelling the other. Crucially (and this matters), Drift does not tell you what to do. It gives you a reading and trusts you to navigate. The decision is always yours. It might nudge you or make suggestions, but you will always be in control.

How we built it

We designed for the future, honestly, rather than retrofitting something real. The design process was iterative and argument-heavy in a good way. We built five different time visualisations before landing on the aurora. We went through three versions of the card system before realising the problem wasn't the components, it was that we were designing text-heavy insight cards when what we needed was number-first visual cards. The waveform became an aurora specifically because the waveform read as sleep tracking data the moment you looked at it, wrong category, wrong feeling entirely. The colour system went through a full accessibility audit at every iteration. Every state colour tested against WCAG AA on every background it touches. Presence and Warp both needed corrections from the original brand palette before they were legible at small text sizes.

Challenges we ran into

Design decisions were the hardest part. We had tight time constraints and were exploring visualization approaches with little precedent or documentation. There wasn’t much to reference, so many decisions required fast iteration and judgment calls. The main challenge was scope: what to show, what to hide, and how to avoid overwhelming users with data that might be interesting but not essential. Since the signal is multidimensional, it was easy to overbuild. If we had more time, we would have wanted to conduct more A/B testing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

First, the idea of relative time tracking. Framing and measuring the gap between clock time and perceived time felt new, and our quick landscape scan didn’t surface existing tools doing this directly. Getting that concept defined clearly was a key step. Second, we stayed user-focused. Every decision came back to: Is this useful? Is this necessary? Does this actually help someone? That helped us avoid adding features just because they were interesting. We also cared about the visual design. Beyond function, we wanted it to feel thoughtful and well-designed, something people would actually want to engage with.

What we learned

We learned that accessibility and brand identity don’t have to compete with each other. When you define design tokens early and intentionally, accessibility becomes part of the system rather than a constraint added later. Considering it from the start allows us to build a visual identity that feels distinct while still meeting accessibility standards. It wasn’t about sacrificing brand for usability but about structuring a system where both could coexist.

What's next for Drift

The device that tracks a user’s perception of time. It's the core mechanic and the biggest gap between our design and a real product.

Also, the onboarding. We were considering an initial calibration period, five days of data tracking, before the app gives any form of insight. Most apps jump straight into giving insights immediately, whereas Drift's credibility depends on building the data it needs before it has something true to say.