PROJECT
OVERVIEW
Designing an MHealth app to help reduce troubled sleepers’ stress of going to bed.
Details
IOS Mobile app design, Figma, Ironhack Design sprint project
Team
Marc-Henri Bechalier & myself
Role
UX/UI designer, UX researcher
Timeframe
8 days
THE CHALLENGE
The Daily Health Conference, a fictional non-profit organisation, challenged us to design an MHealth app for their members.
Dedicated to promoting health and wellness across the world, the DHC wanted to increase their membership figures by offering new members free to use mobile apps for health-related services once they had signed up to their website.
CONSTRAINTS & MUST HAVES
Due to the vast market size of MHealth apps, the final product needed to be an MVP that focussed on one important aspect of wellness.
We could choose and identify the aspect we wanted to design for, provided that the idea was backed up by UX research.
To narrow down the scope slightly, we were given two key Must haves to implement in our product:
Users need to be able to monitor and track their progress
The app should encourage users to adopt a healthier lifestyle
SCOPING IT DOWN
With the goal of creating an app that promotes a healthy lifestyle and tracks your progress, we thought about how this could be applied to encourage a better night’s sleep.
Our initial discussion suggested anything from dream interpreters to sleep talking recorders. These ideas were quickly disbanded however as documenting these activities are not beneficial to improving overall health.
We narrowed our online search field down to France for geographic reasons and time constraints.
This also helped us to focus on gathering information on sleeping behaviours and disorders in a smaller area, making the data more manageable and relatable.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Troubled sleepers need to be able to track their daily activities in order to understand how these affect their night time routines.
THE SOLUTION
Complete a short sleep assessment
A 3 step questionnaire.
Simple, image based questions that can be answered quickly.
Multiple choice options that include a range of activities emphasising the importance of tracking all habits.
3. Activate stress free mode
A daily quote encourages the user to start their day on a positive note.
Stress free mode emphasises app’s mission and functions like airplane mode.
2. Track your data once a month
A personalised interface that reminds the user when to interact with the app.
A monthly sleep analysis review allows users to see their responses translated into a cumulative graph.
Tracking emotions instead of qualitative data to help users see a relationship between activities and their nighttime experiences.
SECONDARY RESEARCH
A 2019 paper published by the Santé publique France reported:
13.1% of the French population suffered from insomnia
And a statement from STADA (pharmaceutical company) who published a report in 2022 said:
“Disturbed sleep in turn can add to and exacerbate existing overextension, stress and anxiety.”
PRIMARY RESEARCH: SURVEYS
To collect our own quantitative data on sleeping disorders, we published a survey online, gaining 81 responses after 4 days.
We asked questions like:
|||| 59.3% were women |||| 39.5% were men
71.9%
had trouble falling asleep and/or woke up in the middle of the night.
PRIMARY RESEARCH: INTERVIEWS
52%
experienced these issues 2-4 times per week.
We also conducted four interviews with people who had experienced various levels of sleep disturbances.
This allowed us to locate similar patterns in our research, gain a deeper understanding of our user by empathising with their experiences and frustrations.
2/4
Use sleep related apps to monitor their behaviour and/or help sleep.
Users also were aware of and recognised feelings of stress and had previously tried to
“listen to their bodies”
when sleep deprived.
54.3%
use their phone before going to bed at night.
3/4
Avoided going to bed if they felt stressed during the day.
What did these results tell us?
50% were aware of sleeping apps and open to trying them out.
A significant number had difficulty getting to sleep, and from our in-person interviews, we learned that feelings of stress would lead to intentionally delaying sleep and later on, to waking up in the middle of the night.
THE SUBJECT MATTER EXPERT
To help us discuss and clarify our research findings, we spoke with a sleep therapist who was our SME.
The SME confirmed that trouble falling asleep and waking up in the middle of the night are both forms of insomnia. Incidentally, this was also the most common sleep issue found in our primary and secondary research.
What causes people to experience these issues is stress during the day which creates anxiety around sleep.
People like to track their movements to control or “listen to” their bodies but don’t do anything with the data.
The amount of negative language online surrounding sleeping disorders which can have a greater stressful impact on individuals searching for answers.
After a scroll through the internet, the latter was very quickly confirmed and suddenly we could not unsee the amount of sleep negativity, e.g. these posters from the Good Body:
COMPETITOR ANALYSES
With over 50% of our survey responders claiming they experience sleeping disorders up to 4 times a week, we recognised there was a definite market for tackling sleeping disorders digitally.
With 13 sleep category apps on Apple’s App store alone, sleep trackers are the first category searched for. We analysed the 3 most popular apps that our users had mentioned downloading during their interviews.
Understandably, competing with longstanding wellness and sleep apps with our small amount of data would be impossible.
However, we noticed that none of our competitors were taking into account the daily activities of their users to understand how their lifestyles might affect their sleep schedules and trigger disorders.
The user’s state of stress is a given factor for downloading each app, but the link between it’s cause and individual’s corresponding emotions are ignored...
USER PERSONA & JOURNEY
For the final tool in the define stage, we built a user persona and journey map.
As 59.3% of answers from our survey were female between 26–35 years old, our user persona also became a young working woman.
Caroline’s journey showed us that the main design opportunities occurred during her night time routine, taking into account how the aftermath of a bad night’s sleep affected her behaviour the next day.
DEVELOPING IDEAS
We asked ourselves the question: How might we design an app which collects usable data without triggering further stress in our users?
We mind mapped our ideas on a white board and agreed on the Must Haves that we wanted to implement on top of the challenge’s existing key features:
An overall positive attitude.
A friendly and simple app.
Discretely collect and monitor data from users without triggering sleep performance anxiety.
With these 3 takeaways, we used the crazy 8 method to come up with some low-fidelity concepts and wireframes of what we envisioned our MVP to look like.
TESTING MID-FIDELITY
Once we had settled on our wire frames, we built our mid-fidelity on Figma.
Due to our 8 day time constraints, it was crucial that we test out our prototype, with our Must haves before the final presentation.
Our 5 testers reported that the user flow was easy to follow and the app simple to use.
Testers found the activity select screen too complicated to follow and unsure which categories related to which activities
To maintain the app’s simplicity, we got rid of the drop down menus, opting for a vertical scroll only.
STYLING & BRANDING
Once we were happy with our mid-fidelity and had rectified the main bug found during our user testing, we were able to finally experiment with colour, style and branding.
We chose a purple scheme due to the colour’s association with calmness, dreaming and escape from reality.
A simplistic design, with a white font against a dark background and text describing the activity icons also ensured that our app was accessible to all users and would not be stressful to engage with in the morning.
Creating our friendly sleep mascots, little blobs that guide the users as they fill in their sleep assessment added a lighthearted touch to what can be an annoying task to complete.
And the name? Nukkua means to sleep in Finnish. The idea was inspired by the various nationalities in our class and multiple languages spoken. We tested out “to sleep” in multiple languages to find a sound that best reflected our app’s design and feel.
HIGH-FIDELITY PROTOTYPE
REFLECTIONS
From a personal perspective, I really enjoyed researching this topic in greater detail due to my own sleeping disorders. Speaking with our people who have suffered from the same or other disorders was also extremely comforting and therefore, whilst the brief may have been fictional, the cause and impact of this project has a very real and current outreach and audience.
I loved the simplicity of design here, as it proves that UI does not always need to be overly complicated and saturated.
Due to time constraints, we were not able to test the app out over a longer period of time, something that I wish we could have tried out to see whether or not our deliverable might have a positive affect on our users.