UX/UI | CHALLENGE
Napp — Simple Bedtime Routines for Families
A two-week challenge to craft a wellness app focused on young parents juggling bedtime routines for their children.
This marks our fourth UX/UI Bootcamp’s project, where Natália Trailin, Maddalen and I were tasked with designing a wellness app within a timeframe of less than two weeks, excluding a Christmas break in the middle.
Initially, we grappled with the broad spectrum of wellness, which includes areas like meditation, exercise, fitness, diet, nutrition, and habit tracking apps. However, through discussions, we eventually concluded that sleep is a fundamental factor likely to impact overall bodily health. Consequently, we decided to focus our efforts on creating a wellness sleep app.
Early research and competitor analysis
We then started to conduct research on that topic and it clearly confirmed our initial assumptions. Did you know that bad sleep habits can cause from physical pain to mental health disorders ? We dug into various medical articles, from USA’s National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute to sleepfoundation.org. This confirmed that we were heading in a promising direction, until we decided to conduct a competitor analysis…
Indeed, the market is flooded with numerous sleep apps, including an unexpected Pokemon-themed one ! Nevertheless, we dedicated ample time to meticulously analyze their features, specificities, and visual elements. Many offered meditation guides, soothing sounds or stories, breathwork exercises, sleep tracking capabilities with night recording, and detailed sleep analysis featuring graphs and trends, as well as gentle alarms, among other features. At this juncture, we began contemplating how we could set ourselves apart in this competitive landscape.
Building on our initial assumptions, we identified two distinct target audiences:
- Working young adults, given their stressful living conditions.
- Parents, specifically those managing young children.
Children, you said ? While examining the landscape, we observed that the majority of sleep apps were tailored for adults, focusing on stress management. However, apart from the Pokemon-themed app geared directly towards children, none seemed to address parenting issues and their influence on the overall well-being of the family. This realization defined our target audience and set the overall direction for our project.
Primary research and problem statement
Gathering interviews and survey insights
Subsequently, we developed an interview guide and a survey, striving to disseminate them as widely as possible within our constrained timeframe. As the week approached its end, signaling the commencement of the Christmas break, we were acutely aware that our team would be disbanded, interrupting the workflow. Hence, the imperative was to accomplish as much work as possible beforehand.
Within that short timeframe, we gathered responses from 14 survey participants (young parents) and conducted interviews with 7 individuals. While the numbers were modest, they provided a solid foundation for our research. Noteworthy insights began to surface, including the demand for educational content about children’s needs validated by experts, the challenges in establishing a clear routine due to children’s resistance or evolving needs, and the struggle for parents to maintain a work-life balance. Notably :
- 64.3% of respondents dealt with irregular sleep schedules, and
- 57.1% expressed interest in receiving sleep hygiene tips or educational resources for children.
We also carefully noted their motivations:
- Joseph highlighted that enhancing bedtime routines for children would ultimately lead to improved routines for parents, resulting in better sleep quality.
- Lara expressed her desire to enhance her family’s sleep habits, noting that after putting the children to bed, she often feels very tired and sometimes anxious.
Equally important were their concerns. For instance, Prateek shared that consistently inputting data about the baby’s sleep pattern into an app would pose a challenge for him. Another participant mentioned that remembering to use an app would be difficult, describing the last hours of the day as akin to a high-speed tunnel. Later on, you’ll see how we translated these elements into concrete design solutions.
Understanding our users
As we really wanted to put ourselves in our audience’s shoes, we also decided to quickly use an empathy map…
… ultimately guiding us in the creation of our user persona. Allow us to introduce Laura, a 36-year-old mother grappling with the challenge of establishing effective bedtime routines for her 3-year-old, Emma :
Building on this approach and drawing from our gathered data, we envisioned Laura’s journey from returning home after a hectic day at work to navigating through Emma’s restlessness and bedtime routine until the following day.
At this point, we had a clear problem statement in mind :
Parents of young children need to create and maintain sleep routines for their kids because they struggle with their children’s resistance and irregular sleep patterns which negatively impact the family’s overall well-being.
And… Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2024, dear readers ! As you might have guessed, that’s when we all returned to our respective families to cherish some time together. I also had the opportunity to empathize with our users’ challenges, as my brother came to celebrate with his wife and their six-month-old bundle of energy 👶
Crafting a minimum viable solution
Generating ideas
Upon returning on Monday, January 8th, we realized that we had only until Thursday, January 11th, to complete the entire project. Consequently, we promptly began generating ideas, initiating the process with the Crazy 8s method. This led to a diverse range of interesting and convergent concepts, spanning from general and personalized expert advice to sleep tracking features and routine planners. Additionally, our task included integrating a dashboard for users to monitor their progress. In our context, this involved tracking children’s bedtime routines and their experiences throughout the week, month, or year.
To achieve a Minimal Viable Product by the project’s deadline, we focused on a routine planner that enables users to personalize their routines and access various helpful bedtime features. This includes a storytelling feature and a learning page where users can access valuable resources about children’s sleep patterns from experts.
Evening flow : bedtime !
To progress further, we needed to envision the user journey that Laura would undertake within the app. Addressing our users’ concern about forgetting to use the app, we envisioned the process starting with a notification prompting Laura to initiate the bedtime routine. Subsequently, Laura would navigate to the routine page, where she could access and potentially customize her child’s routine. We envisaged the flexibility for users to create multiple routines, such as having a distinct routine for each child or a unified routine for all of them.
As the moment to put her child to bed approached, Laura could utilize various features of the app, such as telling a bedtime story. We envisioned providing both an audio version and a written transcription of the storytelling, allowing Laura the choice of playing the audio or narrating the story herself.
Morning flow : informing the app
As we opted to concentrate on the bedtime routine and forego the creation of a sleep tracking feature that would require parents to leave their phones in their child’s bedroom overnight, we recognized the necessity for users to inform the app about their bedtime routines’ experiences. However, we recalled our users’ apprehension about the need to manually input data into the app daily, which ultimately would led to them discontinuing its use.
Hence, I proposed the implementation of a straightforward and very simple Q/A page to be launched each morning through a notification. This would enable users to easily convey their experiences from the previous evening and get a simple recap afterwards with personalized advices.
Early sketches and Mid-Fidelity wireframing
Here, you can examine the initial sketches we drew for both user flows and the resulting Mid-Fidelity wireframes derived from them.
Additionally, we included a “Features” page, allowing users add favorites from a range of features conceptualized based on suggestions and challenges provided by our interviewees. For instance, storytelling took the top spot, but we also considered classical music suggestions, white noise, and even home device control (to manage the kids’ room temperature or humidity, for example).
You can also observe the diverse feedback we received during the early stages of conducting initial concept and usability tests.
Among the insights we received, we realized the necessity of incorporating a weekly calendar into our routine page, allowing users to modify their routines based on specific days. Initially, we envisioned users pressing a button to indicate when they had completed the current routine, aiming to calculate the routine duration for further comparison and analysis on the dashboard. However, tests revealed that none of our users considered doing so, even after enhancing the button’s visibility in our mid-fidelity version. Consequently, we decided to eliminate it at this stage.
Despite users grasping the purpose of the Q/A page, the specific information we needed the app to collect and how we would utilize and display it remained unclear at this stage. Consequently, we opted for a limited number of very simple questions to make the process even more straightforward. Our focus was on determining :
- whether the child fell asleep as expected,
- faced struggles in falling asleep,
- experienced overall good or bad sleep quality during the night, and
- whether users followed their planned routine or not.
We aimed to avoid overwhelming users while still obtaining relevant insights for the dashboard.
Additionally, I proposed the inclusion of an optional open-ended question. This feature would allow users to provide more detailed information, thereby facilitating the app in offering more personalized advice in the recap page.
But overall, users understood the flow of the app and weren’t confused.
Adding style
Moodboard & logo
Hence, with time ticking away, we progressed to styling and high-fidelity, commencing with the development of a moodboard :
Drawing inspiration from existing sleep apps in the market, we observed their tendency to incorporate calming and nighttime colors. Please share your thoughts in the comments regarding what it evokes for you. Our goal was to capture the following brand attributes:
- Family
- Relaxation
- Comfort
You might have also noticed our logo in the introduction slide. Due to the limited timeframe, I created it using Midjourney and made manual adjustments in Photoshop to ensure it harmonized with our moodboard and overall color scheme.
High-Fidelity Prototype
Following that, our focus shifted to completing the High-Fidelity prototype before Thursday morning, giving us time to draft and rehearse a concise 5 to 7-minute presentation encompassing the entire project. Here’s the product that we presented.
Finally, I spent a few extra hours here and there working on the feedback we received that day, mostly alignement concerns, as well as a dashboard rework. Indeed we didn’t had much time to make it original enough. But of course there’s still work to be done ; it’s a never ending process.
Below, you can explore the final product and prototype as of today :
Conclusion
Next steps
Given more time going forward, our next steps would be to :
- gather more insights through ongoing usability and desirability testings ;
- continue perfecting the overall high-fidelity quality, especially the dashboard ;
- add a feature allowing users to specify the routine’s target (for example, « Emma » in this scenario) ;
- add the « profile » page ;
- add the « Learn » page we intially imagined for users to get relevant expert advices and resources on sleep and bedtime routines.
A last few words
In closing, our journey to design Napp has been a rewarding experience. Despite challenges, we’ve created a user-friendly prototype with a family-focused and soothing feel in less than two weeks.
A heartfelt thank you to my incredible teammates for their hard work, and to you, Medium readers, for your interest and support !
If you want to know more about me — where I came from, what I’m up to — consider also following me on LinkdIn by clicking here !
