Digital Wellbeing: Workshop — Design Thinking Guru

If the systems you interact with are toxic, that leads to digital wellbeing issues. As a product leader, your job is not just to save yourself but to save others.

Talvinder Singh, from a Pragmatic Leaders session on digital wellbeing design

Digital wellbeing is not a buzzword. It is a real, measurable impact on how users experience your product and how it affects their lives. The trap is to treat digital wellbeing as a checkbox or a marketing line. The actual job is to embed it into the user experience—so users feel empowered, informed, and in control.

Zomato offers a useful case study. It has features like restaurant ratings that guide better dining choices. Yet, it also aggressively promotes deals and discounts, encouraging increased consumption even when users know they might be ordering too often. This tension illustrates the challenge of digital wellbeing in practice.

Empowerment is about enabling conscious choice, not pushing consumption

Empowerment means giving users the ability to make decisions aligned with their wellbeing. It is not about restricting choice but about removing manipulative nudges.

Zomato promotes continuous deals and discounts, creating an illusion of cheapness. But in India, it is often cheaper and healthier to cook at home. Users know this but still get pulled into ordering frequently. This is a failure of empowerment.

What empowerment looks like in practice:

Features that highlight restaurants or menu items based on nutritional value, not just popularity or discounts.
Default filters that prioritize healthier cuisines or high-nutrition options.
Avoiding manipulative tactics that push overconsumption under the guise of savings.

// scene:

Product design review at a food delivery startup

Product Manager: “Our data shows users order late-night snacks repeatedly, driven by push notifications about discounts.”

Design Lead: “Can we redesign notifications to encourage balanced choices instead of just more orders?”

Data Analyst: “We could highlight healthier options in the app and track if that reduces late-night ordering spikes.”

The team realizes empowerment means shifting from volume-driven metrics to wellbeing-driven metrics.

// tension:

How to balance business goals with genuine user empowerment

Awareness means illuminating behaviors and goals, not hiding them

Users cannot make mindful choices if they lack insight into their own behaviors. Zomato currently provides order history but lacks tools for users to analyze eating habits or spending patterns.

Good awareness features include:

Dashboards that show users their ordering frequency, spending, and nutritional intake.
Insights that compare current behavior against personal goals or healthy benchmarks.
Educational content embedded in the app about nutritional information and benefits of various diets.

Android's Digital Wellbeing dashboard is a great example. It provides clean, inviting usage data that helps users reflect on their smartphone habits. Apple offers similar features, informing users when their screen time increases or decreases.

// thread: #product-wellbeing — Designing awareness features that promote mindful ordering

Priya (PM)Users tell us they don't realize how often they order. What if we showed them weekly summaries?

Rahul (Engineer)We can build a spending and nutrition dashboard in two sprints.

Meera (Designer)Let's keep it simple, with visual cues and tips for healthier choices.

Priya (PM)This will help users connect their actions to their wellbeing goals.

Control means transparent, customizable settings that respect user preferences

Current Zomato filters allow basic search customization but lack deeper control related to health goals or spending limits.

Control features that support wellbeing:

Allow users to set personal health goals that influence restaurant and menu item highlights.
Enable limit-setting for order frequency or spending, with alerts when thresholds are approached.
Provide transparency about how recommendations and deals are generated.

Google's Family Link offers a model: parents get transparent access to kids' activity and schedules, empowering appropriate control without overreach.

// learn the judgment

You are PM at a food delivery startup in Mumbai. User feedback shows many feel guilty about frequent ordering but lack tools to control spending. Your CEO wants to increase order frequency through more deals.

The call: How do you balance business goals with user control features that promote digital wellbeing?

Your reasoning:

// practice

Your task: How do you balance business goals with user control features that promote digital wellbeing?

your reasoning:

0 chars (min 80)

Adaptability requires context-aware, evolving experiences

Zomato’s recommendation algorithms are static and do not adapt to user health goals or changing preferences.

Adaptability means:

Employing algorithms that learn from user feedback and adjust recommendations accordingly.
Incorporating contextual signals such as time of day, location, or user activity.
Suggesting healthier options during late-night hours or near gyms, reflecting the user's current context.

This goes beyond personalization to proactive support for wellbeing.

// thread: #product-ai — Building adaptive recommendation systems for wellbeing

Data ScientistOur model can factor in time-of-day and location to tailor recommendations.

PMGreat, can it also downrank heavily discounted items if the user has set health goals?

Data ScientistYes, with user goal inputs, we can adjust the recommendation weights dynamically.

PMThis is how adaptability promotes mindful choices without restricting freedom.

Digital wellbeing is a product leadership responsibility

Here is the uncomfortable reality: most Indian apps, including Zomato, Swiggy, and Paytm, do not currently prioritize digital wellbeing. Their focus is growth, engagement, and transactions.

As a product leader, your actual job is to challenge that status quo. To build products that respect users’ time, health, and budgets—not just their wallets.

Field exercise: Assess digital wellbeing in your product

Time: 20 minutes

Pick a consumer app you use regularly—preferably one with frequent engagement like food delivery, social media, or e-commerce.
Evaluate it against the four digital wellbeing principles: empowerment, awareness, control, and adaptability.
For each principle, write down:
- One feature that supports wellbeing.
- One gap or risk that could harm wellbeing.
- One concrete improvement you would propose.
Reflect on how these changes would impact user experience and business outcomes.

This exercise will train you to spot wellbeing issues and design thoughtful solutions.

Test yourself: The wellbeing feature trade-off

// interactive:

Balancing Engagement and Wellbeing

You are PM at a Series B food delivery startup in Bangalore. Your CEO wants to launch a new 'Deal of the Day' feature to boost orders. User research shows it encourages overordering and user guilt. You have two weeks before the feature deadline.

Your CEO asks: 'Can we launch the deals as planned? The marketing team is ready.'

Where to go next

Apply user research to uncover wellbeing pain points: User Research Methods
Design adaptive and personalized experiences: Designing for Personalization
Develop ethical frameworks for product decisions: Ethical PM
Measure user engagement with wellbeing metrics: Metrics and KPIs