Design Principles for Wellbeing-Centered Task Management
Most productivity tools assume we all have steady motivation, predictable energy, and a linear workflow. For people dealing with depression or fluctuating mental health, those assumptions break down quickly. This paper proposes six design principles for productivity apps that prioritize sustainable engagement and wellbeing over raw output. They were tested through MyBattery, a prototype mobile app.
Depression affects nearly 18.3% of adults (Witters, 2025), bringing significant disruptions to cognitive control, motivation, and emotional regulation. Despite this reality, everyday digital tools still expect users to have perfectly stable motivation and make steady, linear progress.
Much HCI research ties productivity gains to interface usability and system efficiency. This work generally assumes that users are mentally stable, motivated, and ready to adapt, and it rarely treats fluctuating mental health as a design factor.
People managing depression also tend not to rely on a single system. They assemble adaptable, multi-tool setups and pick up or drop apps depending on their energy, attention, and mood. These findings from digital health research have not reached mainstream productivity design, where apps continue to prioritize speed and output over psychological safety. As a result, they often fail the users who are most vulnerable to guilt, shame, and self-doubt.
A literature review and comparative app analysis surfaced ten recurring gaps between how tools are built and how people with depression actually use them.
This research uses a qualitative, design-focused approach rooted in HCI and human-centered design principles. Rather than measuring efficiency, the goal is to build a framework for productivity tools suited to people experiencing depression.
The methodology included an academic literature review drawing from HCI, human factors engineering, clinical psychology, and digital health, paired with a comparative analysis of widely used mental wellness and productivity apps on iOS.
Each principle targets a specific embedded assumption in current tools and replaces it with a concrete design requirement. Together they form a framework covering energy and effort, language and tone, cognitive load, and user autonomy.
Most productivity tools assume a flat, reliable baseline of human energy. When users skip a day, slow down, or fall short of targets, the interface treats it as a failure. For someone with depression, this is not an edge case but a recurring reality. Tools need to let users signal their current capacity and automatically adjust daily targets without making them feel that they have failed.
Traditional productivity tools focus on speed and maximum output. That performance-first framing ignores psychological safety and fails users for whom slow, consistent effort is the realistic goal. Interfaces should surface longitudinal trends and small wins rather than fixating on daily completion rates.
The language an interface uses carries implicit assumptions about who the user is and what they should be capable of. Clinical framing, features that feel like surveillance, and tonally mismatched prompts can cause users to disengage or stop being honest with the tool. This principle emerged directly from formative evaluation feedback. One participant noted that distress keyword detection made her feel monitored rather than supported, and said she would not share how she was really feeling if she thought the app was watching for it.
Daily streaks, red overdue alerts, and aggressive reminder notifications are standard in most productivity tools. For users who already struggle with guilt or negative self-evaluation, these patterns can trigger shame that leads to abandoning the app entirely. Non-punitive design reframes the interface as a collaborator rather than an accountability enforcer.
Depression impairs cognitive control, which makes decision-making and task initiation significantly harder. When an app shows a large, unstructured task list, users in a low-energy episode may be unable to start anything. The system should take some of that work off the user by breaking projects into small, manageable steps and reducing the number of things asking for attention at once.
Digital health tools often fail by locking users into rigid pathways. Productivity apps do the same through inflexible calendars and interactions that are hard to exit or undo. Systems should respect autonomy: users need to be able to pause, shift, or restructure their day without friction. The formative evaluation identified several places where this principle was not yet implemented, including the absence of a cancel option during wind-down and difficulty exiting the SOS modal.
The six principles were implemented in a working prototype available at mybatteryapp.com. This section describes how each principle was translated into interaction design.
The app opens with a daily readiness check covering energetic categorization (High / Medium / Low / Hibernate), affective mapping, an optional brain dump, and a somatic reflection prompt. Each component is voluntary, and the interface does not score or evaluate the inputs.
Tasks are organized into Must, Should, and Could tiers. The number of tasks visible in each tier scales automatically based on the user's declared energy state. Each task includes a duration estimate and a bi-directional energy impact value indicating whether completing it will drain or recharge the user. Incomplete tasks reset daily without accumulating negative visual weight.
MyBattery replaces conventional productivity metrics with a visual Energy Battery running from 0 to 100%. It updates as the user completes tasks and events and can be overridden manually at any time. When the battery drops below roughly 20%, the app enters a reduced-complexity mode in which fewer tasks are shown and the interface is simplified.
The Wellness Hub offers grounding exercises, guided breathing (Box, 4-7-8, and custom patterns), a micro-journal, a Pomodoro timer, and self-administered screenings for depression (PHQ-9), anxiety (GAD-7), and burnout. Crisis resources are available through an always-accessible SOS modal. Sensitive data is not stored.
When the system detects a low-capacity state or the day ends, it prompts a wind-down sequence including activity summaries, gratitude prompts, a mood check-in, and a reflective sentence-building exercise. The intent is to give the day a soft close, normalizing rest and preventing the psychological weight of unfinished tasks from carrying into the evening.
Users can enable Privacy Mode (blurs task names and mood values on screen) and Gentle Mode (softens all system language). Task data is encrypted end-to-end using AES-GCM-256. These features give users control over their data and over how the app presents information.
A formative evaluation was conducted with five participants, including a licensed therapist with an MS in Mental Health Counseling and a participant with an MS in Experimental Psychology. The evaluation used an informal think-aloud format in which participants explored the app on their own and gave verbal and written feedback.
"When the mental health scaffolding is working well, it becomes invisible. The app feels like a thoughtful productivity tool."
No participant described the mental health framing as unusual or clinical, which suggests the principles were integrated into the interaction layer rather than layered on top of it.Wind-down had no cancel option, the SOS modal was difficult to dismiss, and changes to settings did not prompt users to save before leaving. These issues indicate a gap between Principle 6 as stated and as implemented.
The energy label "High" following "How are you arriving today" was read as unintentionally humorous. Distress keyword detection made one participant feel watched, and she said she would not be honest with the app if she thought it was scanning her input.
The licensed therapist noted that grounding exercises (suited to hypoarousal) and breathing exercises (suited to hyperarousal) were presented as a flat list with no guidance on when to use each. A prompt-first model would better reflect clinical practice.
988 was listed with text options only, but 988 supports both call and text. More broadly, presenting crisis resources as the only mental health pathway is a poor fit, since many users who need support are not in crisis.
Participants wanted repeatable tasks, configurable stillness break timing, a mascot for battery visualization, font size accessibility settings, and an energy drain value surfaced as a primary interaction rather than buried in an overflow menu.
Navigation bar switching on swipe, tutorial referencing the old app name (Liveflo), breathing orb not holding its expanded state, and a stillness timer with potential seizure risk were flagged for future development. These are implementation issues rather than failures of the principles.
The low-battery-triggered wind-down prompt was described as a natural and well-timed nudge.
The tri-tier task structure (Must / Should / Could) was described as clear and easy to read.
The idea that tasks could carry energy drain or recharge values was well received, and participants understood and engaged with the concept immediately.
Adding a mascot to make battery state more expressive was suggested independently by one participant, which aligns with a feature already planned.
For people experiencing depression, productivity means staying engaged without loss of dignity and developing a relationship with one's own capacity that is honest, flexible, and kind. Mainstream productivity apps are designed for an idealized user with stable energy and motivation. By combining academic literature, a comparative app analysis, and a working prototype, this research developed six design principles for a more humane approach to task management.