Summer 2025Emotion Design, Mobile, AI System Design

Dawdle

An anti-procrastination app built on emotion, not time management.

Productivity apps treat procrastination as a scheduling failure. The research says it is an emotional regulation failure, which is why people who own five task managers still cannot start. Dawdle designs for the feeling that comes before the task.

Role: Sole product designer
Team: A founder researching procrastination psychology, and a mobile dev team
Scope: 30+ screens and a design system in one month
Outcome: 200+ users, five star App Store rating

Procrastination is emotion regulation, not time management

Almost every product in the category is built on the opposite assumption, so the app becomes one more place to feel bad about the list rather than a way out of it.

Traditional productivity apps organise and track. They are very good at telling you what you have not done, which is exactly the information a procrastinating person is avoiding. The app becomes another surface for the anxiety instead of a way out of it.

Users avoided opening the app because it reminded them of the tasks they were anxious about.
Different emotional barriers need different interventions. Fear of failure, task aversion, and overwhelm do not respond to the same nudge.
The hardest moment is not finishing. It is starting.

A mascot in the design system, not a sticker on a screen

If the barrier is that opening the app feels bad, the first fix is not a feature. It is who greets you.

I worked with the founder to define Pebbles: personality, tone, and the role it plays on each screen. Then I built it into the design system, so the mascot was not a sticker on the home screen but a consistent presence across the product.

Pebbles. Joyful and energetic, deliberately not a productivity aesthetic.

Timer screen before Pebbles — Text-heavy screens raise mental load at exactly the wrong moment. Animation and character carry the same information at a fraction of the cost.

Timer screen with Pebbles — Text-heavy screens raise mental load at exactly the wrong moment. Animation and character carry the same information at a fraction of the cost.

Onboarding, before

Onboarding, with Pebbles

Onboarding is the first promise a product makes. The second version makes a friendlier one.

Pebbles names why you are stuck, then hands you step one

People procrastinate for different reasons, so one intervention cannot work for all of them.

Pebbles asks what is actually in the way, then names it: fear of failure, overwhelm, a task with no obvious first move. From there it offers a strategy matched to that reason rather than a generic pep talk, regulates the feeling, and hands the user the smallest possible starting action.

The tone does the work. A coach that listens reads very differently from a chatbot that answers.

This started as a standalone chat feature. It is where I learned that a character can be a system: once Pebbles had a voice, it could carry onboarding, the timer, and the reward loop without any of them needing their own explanation.

One linear path, because every branch is a chance to quit

How might we design a focus flow that removes friction rather than adding structure?

The flow is linear on purpose. Every branch is a decision, every decision is a chance to stop, and stopping is the failure mode. One path, fewest possible taps, straight to the part that is hardest.

Suggested sessions remove decision fatigue before it starts.

Dawdle reward screen — The reward system builds a positive association with the act of starting, which is the behaviour worth reinforcing.

Dawdle reward collection — The reward system builds a positive association with the act of starting, which is the behaviour worth reinforcing.

Dawdle session completion screen — Learned industriousness: effort that gets rewarded gets repeated. The completion screen is designed to make the next session cheaper.

Five stars, and the mascot turned out to be the mechanism

Designing for emotion is not a colour palette decision. A soothing gradient does not help someone who is scared of their own to-do list. Studying how Duolingo and Finch use their mascots showed me that the character was not decoration on top of the experience, it was the mechanism.

It also taught me to look for the system inside a feature. Pebbles shipped as a chatbot and turned out to be the design system's spine. Noticing that early is the difference between one good screen and a product that holds together.