Focus Monke

Your phone becomes an aquarium while you focus!

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Inspiration

I was grieving the loss of my saltwater aquarium hobby because we had a baby coming soon. So I wanted my phone to look like an aquarium.

I was inspired by those old computer screensavers of saltwater aquariums. I felt like that was the turning point when computers started being seen as something fun, instead of purely utilitarian. We tried to bring that back for the phone. Instead of just locking down your screen and focusing, your phone becomes a beautiful aquarium!

As adults we do a lot of boring tasks that nobody ever gives us credit for. We wanted to celebrate the mundane stuff with little rewards.

What it does

Focus Monke is a gamified focus timer that blocks your other apps and turns your screen into an aquarium full of the fish you've collected! Finish a dive, earn bananas, buy new fish and outfits for Monke, keep your streak alive, and race other Monkes in weekly leagues and group dives.

Some of the fish you can earn

How we built it

I led product design and art direction, while Julia Shtogren created all the illustrations and animations. We worked together every day to keep iterating on the look and the product. We used AI for all the development work, running 24/7. The result: 5,184 commits, 840 builds, 7 App Store releases in 7 weeks, about 600,000 lines of Swift and 7,483 tests. Commits landed at every hour of the day during Shipaton.

Challenges we ran into

We struggled with how to make the user experience super unique, creative and fun, but also intuitive and easy to use. There's a constant battle between unconventional buttons and bright color palettes on one side, and directing the eye and making it obvious what to tap on the other.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Increased day-1 retention from 16% to 30% over the eight weeks of Shipaton, and 90% of people finish our onboarding now (up from 62% at launch).
  • 165 ratings worldwide with a 4.8-star average.
  • 1,806 installs from 61 countries, 5,210 focus sessions completed, 200,348 minutes of focus (that's 139 days).
  • We had way more fun than we ever imagined, and we stayed true to our own artistic expression.

What we learned

We learned we need to be constantly willing to throw out large parts of what we've worked on if a better idea comes along. Especially when we're really struggling with the look of something, that's almost always a sign that something bigger is not working. Julia and I had worked for weeks on a home page for the app, only to realize, after an argument about what the main Monke animation should look like, that the entire thing wasn't working. We threw out weeks of work to simplify the app from three main pages down to one, and in hindsight it looks 100x better, but we had to be willing to throw away a ton of hard work.

We also learned that the less direction we gave each other, and the more we said just do whatever is the most fun, the better the outcomes. There's a tendency as artists to tailor your expression to whatever you think others want to see. It pulls design towards a very normative set of standards and shackles creativity. When we started asking "How should this look?" and just answering "Whatever makes it the most fun!!", we got more productive and found far more creative solutions to everything. Our inner 5-year-olds were freed to do their best work!

What's next for Focus Monke

We're going to build hundreds of new fish to collect and tons of amazing new worlds to explore!! We're also cooking up some fun, weird ways to get the timer out into the wild.

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