Chrome extension · Design sprint

Chrome Focus Window

Duration: March – April 2020 (4-week design sprint)
My role: UX design, user research, and user testing, on a team of 4 designers
Context: A student design sprint sponsored by Google’s Digital Wellbeing team
Tools: Figma, Google Docs, Premiere Pro, Keynote

A concept for helping people stay focused while working in a browser: a focus session that silences notifications and organizes bookmarked tabs by subject, so one task at a time gets your full window.

The real problem

Interviewees told us the #1 source of distraction was irrelevant tabs: forgetting minimized tabs existed, losing tabs across windows, and never finding bookmarks when needed. Bookmarking exists, but as storage, not as a way of working. Layer in phone and laptop notifications, and the browser actively works against sustained attention.

The concept

Focus Window starts you in a fresh browser (previous tabs stay put), lets you create subjects that organize bookmarks by project, and runs timed focus sessions during which notifications from phone and laptop are silenced. A minimizable panel keeps the browser clean while keeping your subject’s resources one click away.

Animated concept: starting a focus session opens a fresh browser window while previous tabs stay put — Starting a session: a fresh window, previous tabs stay put.

Animated concept: creating a subject that organizes bookmarks by project — Subjects organize bookmarks by project instead of as flat storage.

Animated concept: a timed focus session running while notifications are silenced — Timed sessions silence notifications across phone and laptop.

Testing and what it changed

We built a V1 panel with timed sessions, resource wayfinding, and a minimized state, then tested it with 4 college students with loaded schedules, a small n, appropriate for a concept sprint, and enough to find the big problems: users needed more clarity and accessibility within their bookmarks, and more visibility that a focus session was active.

User testing session notes from testing the V1 panel with four college students — Testing the V1 panel with 4 college students, a small n, appropriate for a concept sprint.

We also concept-tested three ways to pull users back on task: timer notifications, tabs reordering by time spent, and tabs growing by time spent. Timed notifications won decisively; the tab-manipulation concepts read as the browser misbehaving.

Those insights became the How-Might-We’s that drove the final iteration: increased session visibility and restructured bookmark access.

How-Might-We frame from the final iteration focused on increased session visibility — The How-Might-We’s that drove the final iteration.

Reflection

If I’d had more time, I wanted to explore the ecosystem: Google Home playing focus music during sessions, Nest lights dimming as a session winds down, Assistant starting and stopping sessions. The sprint scoped to the browser; the behavior we were designing doesn’t stop there.