
Drift
Drift is an Apple Watch + iPhone experience that tracks chronoception targeted for people with ADHD. Collaborative project for FigBuild 2026.
TIMELINE
March 2026 (3-day design sprint)
ROLE
Lead Designer
Design Engineer
TOOLS
Figma
Figma Make
Claude
Claude Code
Christian Lee
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The problem
Every health app tracks something external. None track how time feels.
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Process: the framework
Three temporal states, and none of them is good or bad.
Drift tracks three states, each with its own color. Flow (Indigo) is when time compresses and hours feel like minutes; for ADHD this is where hyperfocus lives, powerful but sometimes a trap, since eight hours lost in Flow can mean missed meals and missed sleep. Neutral (Sage) is when time feels accurate and the clock matches your perception. Drag (Amber) is when time stretches and minutes feel like hours, but a slow, peaceful morning in Drag is restorative, not a failure. The core principle: Drift is a mirror, not a scorecard. It shows you your time and trusts you to decide what it means.

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Process: how it works
Silent sensing all day, an honest mirror at night.

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Process: what changes for real people
Jamie, 24, a software engineer, falls into the hyperfocus trap: 3.5 hours of coding after dinner vanish, feeling like 45 minutes, until Drift nudges at the 3-hour mark and, over weeks, helps Jamie spot the pattern and set a 9 PM boundary. Alex, 28, a grad student, faces the medication curve: Drift reveals their Flow crashing at 2 PM daily, so they bring the Trends data to their psychiatrist and adjust timing together. Sam, 21, a college junior, lives the deadline illusion: a paper due Friday feels like "plenty of time" on Monday until Drift reframes it as "You have 16 hours of Flow left before Friday," and the deadline finally feels real.

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Reflection / outcomes
Our biggest challenge wasn't technical, it was philosophical. We started assuming Flow was "good" and Drag was "bad," but the research, including Csikszentmihalyi's own warnings about flow addiction, flipped that framing completely. Designing for ADHD users whose experience we don't share added another layer: everyone we talked to had different symptoms at different strengths, so there was no single user to design for, and the biometric sensing model was our answer to staying accurate without nagging people who won't respond to constant prompts. The most important lesson was restraint: no real-time state display (it prevents obsessive checking), no scores or streaks (they cause shame spirals), evening reflection only, all data on-device, no social features, and a pause mode for grief or overwhelm. Designing for time blindness means designing for vulnerability, and we took that seriously.

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