Vigo - improve your wellbeing

Inspiration

First, we were inspired (frightened, to be frank) by the vast amounts of time young people, including ourselves (we learned that some of us were spending 4-6 hours on our phones DAILY), waste in the digital environment and how much psychological harm it inflicts. During the project weeks we've decided to test digital minimalism and limit daily phone use to ±1 hour to learn what works and delve deeper into this area. One of the key findings was what to do with all the time you saved in order not to fallback into our old habits.

What it does

Vigo is an app that not only allows you to track, limit or block digital activities on your mobile devices, but also helps you improve your digital wellbeing in the long-term by finding new ways to spend the time that you've "reclaimed" from your devices. Vigo assists in developing new valuable habits through suggestions of personally-tailored hobbies and activities as well as lets you track your progress and includes novel elements of gamification -> the less you use your phone, the more points you earn. Most importantly of all, Vigo is about improving digital wellbeing alongside one's beloved friends, to make one's relationships stronger and motivation to continue higher.

How we built it

Wireframes were made using Figma, while the development of the app use on your device was built using Python, Node.js, Flutter and Google Firebase.

Challenges we ran into

First, it was challenging to deal with an oxymoron: create an app that would be engaging for users, but would not create addiction itself, as the app should still create business value. It was challenging to think of solutions of what the users could actually do during the vast amounts of time reclaimed from using their devices for them not to relapse, thus we created functionality that helps foster one's hobbies. Finally, a major challenge proved to be the code the MVP itself, as we lacked time and resources to complete full app code and integrations. However, we are ready to continue developing this project if the idea gains traction during this designathon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to be tackling one of the most relevant issues that still lacks awareness in our society as well as working solutions. Moreover, we are going against one of the strongest forces nowadays - tech giants like Google, Twitter, and Facebook. Which means that we will be educating users about being more resistant to addictive app design and data privacy awareness, which may lead to users using the applications of these tech giants more frequently. Finally, we are proud of having a working digital activity tracker and user-friendly design of our MVP.

What we learned

We have learned a lot about ourselves and our digital wellbeing, including the fact that some of us are really suffering from addiction to the digital world. However, it is the most important that we learned how to align our completely different skillsets to work towards a single goal - some of us learned the basics of business case development, while others got to scrap the basics of code and UX design.

What's next for Vigo - find balance with technology

To fully develop MVP (1-2 weeks), test it in the most digital wellbeing conscious markets, launch additional features and expand into different markets. The goal is to have more than 30,000 users with 80% satisfaction rate during the next 12 months.