What We Measure
Most apps measure success one way: the longer you use it, the better. We deliberately don’t count it that way. This piece is about what we actually treat as “doing well.”
The number we deliberately don’t watch
There’s a number app-makers stare at more than any other: “time on app” — how long a user spends with you each day, where longer is taken as proof you’re “doing well.”
Applied to Tortoise Time, that logic falls apart.
If our measure of success were “the longer a child stays in our app, the better,” then the smartest thing for us to do would be to keep the child glued to the screen — pop up more things, hand out more rewards, set more “come back for a surprise” hooks.
But that’s exactly the thing we’re trying to help you fight. A tool meant to help a child use the screen less, proving its success by getting the child to use it more — that’s tangled at the root.
So that number, we deliberately don’t watch.
So what do we watch
What we measure is two things that happen away from the screen:
One: is this family fighting a little less about screens? That weekend tug-of-war over “five more minutes” — is it happening less. When time’s up, is the air a little less tense. When the child stops, are there fewer tears and slammed doors. This is hard to capture in a precise number — but you know it in your gut. If, after using it a while, the friction over screens in your home has eased even a little, then to us, it worked.
Two: is the child getting better at stopping on their own? At first, it might take a reminder every time, leaning on that “time’s up” screen. But slowly, the ideal looks like this: the child starts to have a sense of it themselves — setting it down before the limit, not fighting it when the limit comes. What we want isn’t “a child locked down tight.” It’s “a child slowly learning to manage themselves.” The locking is the means; self-awareness is the end.
Which is why we don’t do any of this
Because our measure is those two things, there’s a whole category of design we crossed off from day one and will never add:
- No streaks — there will never be “you’ve opened it 7 days in a row, don’t break the chain!” That uses fear-of-breaking to tether the child, the opposite of the “able to put it down” we want.
- No daily login rewards — we won’t reward you just for opening the app today. The act of opening the app shouldn’t be a thing that earns prizes.
- No “the more you use it, the more you get” — the whole escalating-reward machine, we want none of it.
- No leaderboards, no comparing with other kids — we don’t want to turn “managing your own time” into “beating someone else.”
These designs are common in the industry, and they genuinely “work” — they really do make people use an app longer. But the way they work is exactly the way we don’t want to use on a child.
One sentence for parents
We don’t want to build an app a child can’t put down. We want to build one a child slowly needs less, and a home slowly fights over less. If one day your child is older, can manage their own time, and barely needs us anymore — that’s not us failing. That’s exactly what we were hoping to see.
Curious about the addictive designs we deliberately leave out → Why We Built Tortoise Time See how the gentle guidance works → Gentle Guidance