Pearl

Meet Pearl – your focus fish that keeps you on track and swimming through tasks, one Pomodoro at a time.

In today’s world of endless notifications and persistent doom‑scrolling, college students struggle to manage screen time and cultivate healthy digital habits. Through semi‑structured interviews with 24 students (ages 18–21), we uncovered two key priorities: convenience and personalization. 83% of participants reported that existing solutions rely on rigid limits or guilt‑inducing alerts, which they find discouraging or easy to override, while 79% expressed a strong desire for positive encouragement instead of preventive enforcement. We therefore posed the question:

How might we create a mobile app that helps users build healthy screen habits through engaging experiences and positive encouragement?

A Porter’s Five Forces market analysis revealed a moderately saturated market of personalized productivity and wellness apps, alongside builtin tools like iOS Screen Time. As a new entrant, we saw the opportunity for creating an application that leverages self-driven accountability and gamification to build healthy screen habits that feel rewarding, rather than restrictive.

Meet Pearl, your focus fish that keeps you on track and swimming through tasks, one Pomodoro at a time. During each Pomodoro set, Pearl displays a customizable timer to cue deep focus, hiding distractions, and increasing concentrated, focused learning.

Pearl provides a unique perspective on digital habits, letting you label your favorite apps as “productive” or “distractive,” then visualizes how you actually use them, showing productive versus distractive screen time and phone pickups. This tailored breakdown goes beyond total screen‑time stats to reveal the quality of your habits. By defining what “productive” means to them, users gain a clear, personalized picture of their behavior, empowering them to make intentional choices and build digital habits that align with their own goals.

Along with this insight, we also prioritize consistency. Pearl reinforces consistency with progress metrics, total days used, Pomodoro streaks, and highest daily session counts, drawing on gamified cues from apps like Snapchat, Duolingo, and GitHub. Metrics like this scientifically motivates users to keep pushing themselves, whether it is to beat a personal record, or to maintain their streak.

Our Treasure Chest feature adds variable rewards, randomly hiding a “Daily Task Find” seashell in your first Pomodoro session each morning to unlock new themes and bonuses.

By turning each focus session into a mini scavenger hunt with surprise incentives, Pearl creates an engaging cycle that keeps users coming back, builds momentum, and cements lasting healthy habits.