Designing an app — Rootine, your Bedtime routine planner 🌚
Wellness is at the centre of many individuals concerns. Taking care of your body and mind is a significant individual and societal issue. Thus, as part of my studies, we were asked to work on an application dedicated to wellness. Weight loss, Mental health, Medical Care, … The possibilities were wide, and were carefully explored. We agreed to work on a sleeping application, as sleep impacts 100% of people and more seem to face sleeping problems over the years.
“Sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless man the most guilty.” Franz Kafka
Designing an app — Rootine, your Bedtime routine planner
Timeline: 12 days
Team: Manon Gustave & Martin Lorandin
Software: Figma
Brief
The Daily Health Conference wants designers to rethink how people can adopt and commit to a health-improving routine.
- The app can address any aspect of personal well-being, including (but not limited to): medicine, fitness, nutrition, meditation, time management.
- The app should monitor the users’ progress and encourages them to adopt a healthier lifestyle
- Users must retain control over their personal data (GDPR Compliance)
- The user interface should reflect a new, fresh, updated image aligned with the Daily Health Conference values
Sleep: a wide market
Before confirming our decision, we thought it would be safer to look into our potential competitors first. We noticed the sleeping app market was saturated by many types of solutions. However, a handful really dominate the industry: calm.com, Headspace, BetterHelp to name a few.
We noticed 3 categories of apps:
It’s important to highlight that some of them merge these three options.
- The sleep tracker: it gathers physical data by tracking your sounds and movement, usually using a watch.
- The sleep timer: it gathers behavioural data, as it requires the user to add its own data (“How long did you sleep last night?”). It also provides some personalised tools, such as a clock based on sleep cycles.
- Resources: these apps do not track any data but do provide a large amount of resources for the user to improve the sleep quality (meditation, relaxation, breathing).
Sleep & screens: Secondary research
If you look into data related to sleep, you better not be easily overwhelmed! The amount of research around it is massive. In fact, sleep quality has been an important health concern as is hasdeclined over the years for different reasons: anxiety, working hours extended, blue light produced by screen, …
Here are the main points to know:
User interviews & survey
So if many people are suffering from sleeping disorders, surely the sleeping apps exist to answer a certain demand.
That’s the first assumption we had, and that defined the angle of our survey. When listing our questions, our goal was to find out if people were suffering from sleeping disorders and if yes, what were they using in order to cope.
Based on the answers of 117 people, here are the main figures to note:
Social Media is the most common activity our screeners are doing before going to bed, and 71% even stop scrolling just before sleeping. Finally, 68.4% believe they suffer from a form of light sleeping disorder (insomnia, problems to fall asleep, wake up during the night, etc…)
Only 22% of our respondents answered using sleeping apps. From this sample, we noticed they were mostly using sleep cycling apps and resources and their trust was a bit blurry.
We did gather enough info thanks to the survey, but needed to dig deeper into the details using user interviews. We picked 5 people with medium sleeping disorders, between 25 and 35 years old, and with 9 to 5 working hours.
This word, “Routine” came back in 3 interviews as a positive outcome and an efficient way to reduce anxiety and improve sleep quality. And when researching online for extra info on this, sleep routine is a serious matter!
Persona & Problem statement
Now that we had an overall idea of the ecosystem, we were able to create our persona, Mia. Mia represents the users we will work for.
She is between 30 and 40 years old and has an executive position in a company where she works from 9 am to 5 pm. Her sleep quality could be excellent but she suffers from a few episodes of insomnia or waking up during the night. She knows she is anxious and should make some changes, but doesn’t succeed on her own with a lack of information.
So how can we help Mia? Time to ideate!
Ideation: between sleep tracker & routine planner
We started doing an affinity diagram and organise the different ideas into categories. After a short dot vote, we realised these were the main points that should drive us into the project:
- The routine is an important asset for our users
- They do not trust sleep trackers in terms of transparency but also accuracy.
- They do spend too much time on their screen and know they should stop but fail.
- Our users do suffer from sleeping disorders because of anxiety. They are unsure if they should contact a health professional and who should they reach.
Our concept was born: we would create a Bedtime routine planner!
Why? Well, for many reasons.
First, we noticed a few planners online, but no bedtime planner. So we saw an opportunity there. Also, our users do not want their phones to track their data without having full control over it. The planner requires the user to enter its own data which give full freedom to the user. If using screens before bed is a problem, well we should develop a solution that remembers the user to stop using a phone 2h prior to bedtime!
Meet Rootine, you bedtime buddy
👉 Check-it out on Figma now
Rootine is an app that allows you to build your perfect bedtime routine, to reduce anxiety and improve your sleep quality on the long term.
A few things to know about Rootine:
- First connection: when sign in, you are required to answer to a self-assessment in order for Rootine to understand your needs, your habits, a few details about your work life and your expectations.
- Rootine is meant to be used only twice a day, as we do not want to increase blue light exposition: when validating your task at the evening, and once in the morning when the user is required to fill information about its night.
- Rootine proposes a program of 21 days per activity as it’s the proven time for the human brain to turn a routine into a habit.
- Rootine only proposes two activities at a time. Why? Because our users are anxious. And adding too many activites could cause them extra distress, which is the opposite of the expected result.
Let’s discover Rootine step by step!
Step 1: Add your first routine
The user is to pick a first activity and set up the different information (duration, start date and hour of practice).
Step 2: Routines complete & Night mode
Once added, the user has to perform the activity and validate it on the app. When all the tasks are done, it’s time to use the night mode! The night mode turns your screen in a darker mode but also deactivate any pollution coming from your phone (notifications, sounds, etc…)
Step 3: Morning notification
In the morning, the user receives a notification in the app asking you to rate your night, using a level bar and some tags. They will be able to add their own tag, as the goal is to understand if there are some issues that the app can help to fix.
Step 4: Data check
Once the user has utilised the app for a few days, it’s possible to access all the data entered. The goal is to analyse if the user faces some issues and if yes, which one. The second part would be to understand if Rootine can help or not. If not, the user will be gently advised to contact a health professional to assist them.
For the next sprint
We enjoyed working on this project, but unfortunately, we only had 2 weeks to prioritise and develop the concept. Here is the improvement we would love to bring on the following spring:
- Create a full night mode
- Add a Routine buddy that will guide the user’s in their journey.
- Connect with a medical platform, so users with serious sleeping disorders can get medical assistance.
- Develop a community around sleeping routine, so people could share their routine and exchange what works the best for them.
We had a lot of fun creating this concept and we really hope you enjoyed as well. Feel free to leave any feedback, I would love to have your opinion on it!
