Hi, I’m Doki 🤖
Thanks for bringing me to life!
Your delightful, optimistic, kawaii, & intriguing robopet is brought to you by Sonia Wu, Anupriya Gupta, Lokesh Fulfagar, Adarsh Agarwal, Daisy Dai, Meiyi Chen
If you have ever found yourself scrolling through social media platforms like Instagram for procrastination, you are not alone. According to our research, the average American adult spends 3 hours and 43 minutes on their phone each day, which amounts to more than a day per week. Globally, the average adult spends 2 hours and 27 minutes on social media. Our research shows that people often use social media unconsciously as a way to procrastinate when faced with difficult tasks. While taking breaks is healthy, excessive use of social media for procrastination can consume time and mental resources, leading to feelings of guilt. As a team of six student researchers with diverse backgrounds, we were motivated to explore — How might we foster emotional & cognitive readiness to take on tasks while reducing unconscious overuse of Instagram & the associated guilt amongst millennials with heavy Instagram usage.
After 12 weeks of intense design iterations, we are excited to introduce our design solution: Doki. Doki uses persuasive strategies such as obfuscation, self-affirmation, self-awareness, surveillance, and self-determination to encourage heavy social media users to reduce procrastination on platforms like Instagram and increase their readiness to tackle their next task. By using Doki, users can take control of their social media habits and improve their emotional and cognitive readiness for tackling difficult tasks.
Doki in the Dynamic island to show the battery level, also serving as a break time indicator. (right)
Doki employs several persuasive strategies to encourage healthy social media habits. The primary strategy used by Doki is obfuscation, which involves concealing its true purpose as a tool to encourage healthy social media habits rather than a smart robopet/home companion. Doki also uses self-affirmation and self-awareness, providing prompts and interactions that encourage users to reflect on positive aspects of their day and values and bringing attention to self-discrepancies to encourage behavior change. In addition, we designed an abstraction of Doki, along with an ambient timer and Doki’s eyes, to occupy the iPhone 14’s Dynamic Island while the user browses social media during breaks between periods of concentrated work. The eyes go from neutral to tired as time progresses, providing an element of self-awareness (or surveillance) that encourages the user to more easily leave their break on social media. When the end of the break approaches, the dynamic island expands with a message from Doki to further nudge the user to return to work. From user testing, participants reflected that they enjoyed knowing a sense of time when browsing through social media. We reinforced this finding by adding a digital countdown to Doki’s digital display on the robot when the user is on their break, in case they are away from their phone.
Based on the results of our 14 testing sessions on high-fidelity prototypes, we have gathered positive feedback on our design solution.
In the experimental group (with Doki as an intervention), 60% of participants reported being extremely satisfied with Doki, compared to only 25% of participants in the control group (without Doki as an intervention) who reported being satisfied. The remaining 75% of participants in the control group reported being slightly unsatisfied.
Another interesting finding from the post-survey was that 80% of participants from the experimental group felt slightly or extremely ready to get back to work after their break, compared to only 50% of participants in the control group who felt ready. Additionally, 60% of participants reported experiencing the emotion of joy while using Doki, and 80% reported they would happily recommend Doki to their friends. Overall, all participants loved interacting with Doki and unanimously described it as “cute.”
In conclusion, our testing rounds successfully answered our research question and we believe that Doki has the potential to foster emotional and cognitive readiness for tackling tasks while reducing unconscious overuse of social media platforms like Instagram.