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Team Members & Roles
Team Members & Roles
John Daniel Norombaba, Alexia Ventura, Winston Lee, Phi Tran, Vy Vu participated in UI/UX Research and Design.
Motivation
Motivation
Modern apps and technologies allow college students to address issues with sleep hygiene through a combination of sleep tracking and meditation tools. Having direct experience as college students ourselves, we wanted to create an application that improves personalized support for college students struggling to maintain good sleep hygiene.
Regardless of your age, each person needs a certain amount of sleep to maintain their cognitive, physical, and mental health.
With rising stress levels for American adults, they are not getting enough sleep that they need.
Interrupted sleep, previous sleep deprivation, aging, etc are factors that can affect how many hours you need.
Blue light has its positive/negative effects, but research shows it can decrease sleep quality and sleep duration.
User Research
User Research
On top of our personal experience and research, we conducted a competitive analysis and interviewed 10 participants.
Competitive Analysis
Competitive Analysis
After analyzing various sleep hygiene applications, we concluded that a common gap in all of them was a lack of variety in how users can personalize their experiences. For instance, the content available on many of these apps seemed to be too generalized, and would not consider specific audiences or factors that could also contribute to poor sleep hygiene. We felt that the current apps available to us were limited, especially with the aspect of needing to pay for a premium account to unlock many meaningful features.
User Interviews
User Interviews
Meanwhile, we also sought out and interviewed 10-college aged adults varying in demographics including undergraduate and graduated students, coworkers, roommates, and friends. Our user interviews revealed that within college students, factors like technology and school heavily influence bedtime hygiene.
Key Insights
Key Insights
Insight #1: College students tend to subscribe to a specific routine before bedtime. Some find it difficult to enforce a strict routine. A factor that influences this includes personal tasks and academic tasks. One participant mentioned studying for exams before sleep, and looking at their phone. A common ritual before bedtime includes hygiene like brushing teeth and showering.
Insight #2: Electronic devices influence the sleep hygiene of college students. Some students use technology to help them fall asleep (such as to use Apple Health or the alarm clock). Other students believe it does not help them sleep (like if they scroll through social media). One participant used technology as a sleep-aid, where their phone was away but still active playing music.
Insight #3: From being ready to go to bed and falling asleep, the time it takes varies for college students. Furthermore, the time college students are asleep deviates by an hour or so of their reporting. Factors that influence this behavior include different responsibilities to handle and inconsistent schedules to balance. This was common among a few of our participants.
Insight #4: Among our college student participants, academics and scheduling are important factors. Noted among our participants as well include environment and anxiety. These factors contribute to the state of college students as they fall asleep.
Problem Statement
How might we support college students who have issues falling asleep in maintaining healthy sleep habits when preparing for bedtime?
Sketches
Sketches
Motivated by our newfounded insights, we sought to design an application that incorporates the use of technology to better the sleep hygiene and habits of our users. Based on the user research we conducted through interviews, our target demographic explained how their current sleep schedules are and what they would like to change or improve. From their answers, our team wanted a solution that can be modified based on everyone’s different and busy schedules, and also focuses on limiting doom-scrolling before bedtime.
Low & Mid-Fidelity
Low & Mid-Fidelity
Behind the Low-Fidelity
Behind the Low-Fidelity
This first sketch is based on our idea of including a social media aspect where users can share how they are performing their sleep routines. This was something we came to a conclusion about by trying to target the aspect of community and combining it with sleep routines.
We created the second sketch to give users a way to amend their sleep routines, taking into account the idea of personalized suggestions. We think this targets the problem space of not adjusting your sleep routine due to many factors such as laziness and lack of knowledge/comparison.
The third sketch depicts a lockdown feature that changes the environment for the user, ensuring that opening apps that usually cut into their sleep are less incentivized due to the lockout/longer process of access. We came to the conclusion that most users understand that certain apps inhibit their sleep schedule, but due to easy access, they do not necessarily feel the need to stop and end up “doom-scrolling”.
High Fidelity
High Fidelity
Our high-fidelity prototype built off the design and layout of our low-fidelity prototype including the key components of user sleep factors, daily habits, and a main suggestion page.
Insights from Usability Testing
Insights from Usability Testing
We conducted usability testing and found that users had issues with certain UI elements and the flow of our app. And thus, we addressed the following:
Adding a clearer navigation bar with icons, since users had trouble distinguishing the flow of the application’s screens.
Integrating “Current Sleep Issue” tags with the card themselves for better association. A user had completely ignored the issues during an evaluation, making it difficult to understand why suggestions were presented to begin with.
Providing a consistent flow between the cards and starting an activity, in order to provide continuity with the original suggestion screen.
Added more context to the lock screen, providing more information, as users asked if they were still able to use their lock screen while in this special mode.
The Bedtime Mode page is implemented for IOS Live Activities, allowing the user to see the status of the app. In this case, this is the feature that gives updates on how many of your friends are sleeping, and how long until your alarm.
The Timer Screen contains different features to help the user fall asleep, such as counting backward to promote sleeping and other mindful activities. Users can change this to have other activities displayed.
The third screen is the Home Page, where users have a daily to-do list to track their sleep routine, as well as suggestions to add to their routine based on what the user has written down. This page extends into the Content which is an expanded view when a user has clicked on the suggestions.
The second Content Page is another suggestions page that incorporates research to educate the user about good sleep information they might not have known before. A large reason for this page is because based on our user research, a large reason for bad sleep habits and sleep quality is a lack of information on the topic so incorporating research-backed information seems crucial in aiding in changing sleep patterns.
The Friends Feed incorporates a social factor into the app to aide users in using the app and keeping up to see how their friends are doing regarding their sleep schedule and which activities they are doing. The social factor in the app serves as another motivator and resource for people to use the app and stay persistent in improving their sleep hygiene and habits.
The Profile Page is meant for the user to express their thoughts on the app and also see their personal activity on the app and what activities they have shared towards others. It helps users track their history on the app.
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