03 — Productivity software
Still: Designing a Focus App That Protects Time
Still measures one thing: how much of the day was actually protected. Rather than gamifying streaks or blocking apps, it records focus sessions, scores how uninterrupted each one was, and shows the week as a shape you can read in a second.
Industry
Productivity software
Status
In TestFlight
Disciplines
Product · Mobile · macOS
The problem
- Focus tools tend to reward consistency over quality — a streak counter says nothing about whether the time was any good.
- Blockers treat the person as the problem, which makes them easy to resent and easy to disable.
- Time spent in deep work is invisible after the fact, so there's nothing to reflect on.
What the work had to achieve
- Make protected time measurable without turning it into a game.
- Keep the interface quiet enough to belong to a product about focus.
- Work across the phone and the desk, since focus happens at both.
Our responsibilities
- Product definition
- Brand and interface design
- iOS and macOS application development
- Widgets and Live Activity
Decisions that shaped it
01
Stillness as a score, not a streak
Sessions are scored on how uninterrupted they were. It measures the quality of the time rather than the fact of having shown up, which is the thing worth improving.
02
Named sessions
Attaching a session to what it was for turns history into a record of work done, not a log of minutes elapsed.
03
An interface that practises what it measures
Near-black, minimal type, no badges or celebration. A product about protecting attention shouldn't spend any of it.
Brand and interface
- A dark, typographic interface with one number as the focal point of the day.
- Seven-day activity shown as bare bars, readable at a glance without labels or gridlines.
- A single primary action — Begin — with everything else subordinate to it.
Engineering approach
- Native SwiftUI across iOS and macOS, sharing a model layer between targets.
- Widgets and Live Activity so a running session is visible without opening the app.
- Local-first data, so sessions are recorded whether or not there's a network.
What we delivered
- Product definition
- Brand identity and app icon
- iOS application
- macOS companion application
- Widgets and Live Activity
Services this drew on
New business
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