Pace

Beat doom scrolling and social media addiction with Pace, an educational alternative. Pace’s customizable app icon serves as a placebo placeholder for apps such as Instagram & TikTok.

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Inspiration

Pace was inspired by the rise of doom scrolling on social media and how this can be detrimental to one’s mental health. With Pace, we wanted to support our users in leaving social media and learning new content in the aim of self-enrichment.

What it does

Pace provides text-based content for readers to scroll through in the same scrollable formatting as Instagram Reels and TikTok. Users can change the app icon in Pace’s settings to mirror popular social media apps such as Instagram and TikTok with the purpose of serving as a Users can adjust font size as well as toggle between light and dark mode in the settings of the app.

How we built it

Pace is built with SwiftUI in Xcode. It pulls its data from a static JSON page hosted on Github Pages, for now, but it will be dynamically integrated with an AI API in the future. Pace includes scrolling text content, and pages to swipe between topics of interest. The app has a settings page, from which users can choose their preferred app icon, as well as change font size.

Challenges we ran into

Since Pace’s content at this point is AI-generated, we did run into the challenge of not being able to ensure our content is 100% accurate. Additionally, we did not have the time to integrate API calls to a generative AI model. This would be feasible without too much more work.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

With Pace, we are particularly proud of the interchangeable app icons within the app settings. For example, Pace’s icon can look like Instagram or TikTok, acting as a placeholder that teaches users and encourages them to read more.

What we learned

Going into this project, we completed industry research to ensure that Pace would fit into the App Store marketplace. We found that while doom scrolling on social media can increase already existing mental health conditions, it can even lead to having less satisfaction in life. Reading as a leisure activity is not as popular as it once was, and Gen Z’s current average attention span of 8 seconds makes it difficult for consumers to complete a book. Currently, there are no search options available on the App Store when searching applications to aid in extending one’s attention span with text-based content. On the technical side, we learned how powerful Apple’s new SwiftUI can be. Working with it and the new version of Xcode was a great experience. We’re excited to continue the learning process and add API functionality soon.

What's next for Pace

Looking forward for Pace, we want to implement suggestions at the bottom of each text-blurb that will provide suggestions for local meet-ups in person relating to the text-content. (Ex. A blurb about black holes would suggest local star-gazing events.) In the future, we also hope to automate AI content generation using an API, such as GPT 4 or Gemini. We also would integrate AI fact checkers into Pace’s back end to ensure information being presented to users is accurate. Implementing features to allow users to sign up for Pace’s service by making an account that indicates their interests that want to learn using Pace, then with this information, Pace’s algorithm will be able to suggest content meeting their interests.

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