Designing a walk-to-unlock interaction
What changes when movement becomes part of an interface rather than another metric on a dashboard.
The interaction is the intervention
Most digital-wellness products explain a problem after it happens. Kinetiq starts from a different question: what if the recovery action becomes the way back into the distracting app?
That turns walking from passive health data into a product state. Lock, walk, and unlock must feel like one understandable sequence rather than three unrelated screens.
Designing around system boundaries
The experience combines Screen Time APIs with CoreMotion. Those frameworks have different permissions, update rhythms, and failure states, so the interface has to explain what the system knows without pretending it has perfect certainty.
A tri-modal state machine keeps the rules legible: access is available, a walking break is active, or the requirement has been completed. Each state changes the visual treatment while preserving the same mental model.
What I would test next
The hardest question is not whether step counting works. It is whether the intervention feels firm without becoming punitive. The next useful tests would compare break length, copy tone, and how much progress feedback helps someone finish the walk rather than abandon the flow.