‘Sound Sleep’ — A Mobile App
This is about a mobile App that I had designed as part of my Interaction Design Specialisation Course offered by University of California, San Diego.
It helps you monitor your sleep and radically change the way you experience and view “time” & “Sleep”.
The Prototype can be found in this link : https://projects.invisionapp.com/share/V57YG7DJ7#/screens/176309407_Home_Screen2
Design Brief :
The way people represent time changes how they think about it. Wall calendars remind us of years, seasons, and the dentist appointment 6 months in the future. They codify weeks by wrapping every seven days, and it’s easy to find the weekends — they are on the edges. Clocks help us coordinate with others. Historically, many countries’ citizens adopted pocket watches and clocks along with the railroad. Before the railroad, there was no need for precise time. Daily schedules help us plan. They can encourage us to “fill” our days, or talk about being “free”. When we punch the clock, or bill hours, we turn time into money. These representations are human inventions. Most digital time representations — — clocks, daily and monthly calendars, … — — simply translate paper and gears into pixels and beeps. With the computation and sensing capabilities of mobile devices, can we find a more personal and joyful way to interact with time?
Design Inspiration
- The American Institute of Health estimates that 75–90% of all visits to primary care physicians are stress related. Could an interactive time representation help us be effective and relaxed?
- What if our mobiles were aware of our daily rhythm and helped us reschedule our activities to optimize for our well-being? How could we redesign the alarm clock? Do alarms need to be obnoxious? Maybe an alarm clock could wake us with the smell of delicious breakfast, or coffee? Or maybe its sensing could pay attention to our circadian rhythms, and wake us at an appropriate time? Could a time representation help us get a good night’s sleep?
- How might a design use multiple modalities — — visual, auditory, vibration, … — — selectively or in concert to create more effective reminders?
- How might we help people feel happy and energetic — — when they wake up and throughout the day? What if instead of a clock calendar we had an energy calendar? So that instead of scheduling for 2 in the afternoon, one schedules for “when I’m feeling energetic”, “when it’s nice outside”, or “when it’s quiet”.
- How might we leverage technology to feel more in touch with our temporal rhythms?
- How might we create a new representation of time?
- How can we create better social representations of time?
My Mission: Redesign the way we experience or interact with time !
So I started my exploration with the following Storyboards
The initial paper prototypes were as below:
My observation centres around the design brief on redefining the way people experience or interact with TIME. I wanted to learn about how we can structure our daily work around our sleep and energy levels than following a time based routine. We need to be able to determine when we feel exhausted and get adequate sleep to replenish our body rather than pushing ourselves further & beyond just because our routine based on time wants us to do the task. My aim is to let people know when they need to go to sleep and when they should wake up based on energy levels and not based on time. This could be life saving because there are several factors that affect mental health due to sleep deprivation. Sleep is one of the best medicines a person could have to keep himself healthy. So, I decided to observe three people Alice, Charles & Lauren on how they plan their sleep routine around time.
Alice
Alice is a software programmer who works for a top global company. His work timing is between 10 am and 7.30 pm. He doesn’t have the option of flexible work schedule. He spends 90 minutes commuting back to home from work.
He has to craft a presentation before his stand up meeting, the next day morning. By the time he reaches home, he is totally exhausted and spends 20 minutes having dinner and gets back at his presentation.
He does not acknowledge the fact that he is sleep deprived and tired. He continues working further and further until about 1 am and then goes to bed. In the morning at about 6 am the alarm goes off and he wakes up half asleep. This is where the breakdown happens. There isn’t a monitoring device that lets Alice know that he has not been getting adequate sleep to stay energetic and healthy.
Losing out on his sleep, Alice is not fully charged and energetic to make his presentation at the office. The design opportunity here is to have a wrist band or a watch synched with an app in his phone that will remind Alice about the importance of having a good sleep to get recharged and when he is pushing himself way to much than his body could handle.
Charles
Charles is a freelance graphic designer who works out of his home office. Being a freelancer, he is his own boss and he get to choose what projects he works on, how much time to spend working per day & the place to work from.
Often, he works hard towards completion of his projects, sometimes stretching for an all nighter after which he goes to bed. Here is a design opportunity. He doesn’t know how much adequate sleep he requires after the completion of his project and how much time he can afford to spend relaxing before taking up the next project.
There has to be an app in his phone that monitors his energy level and his sleep cycle that will let him know when its time to take a break and refresh himself in order to stay productive.
As a freelancer, there is a very thin line between work and personal life. Unlike a regular employee who goes to office for a set period of time for work, a freelancer doesn’t have a stipulated work period and time management becomes a key. Therefore, having an app that helps Charles in managing his time effectively will be of immense help for him.
Lauren
Lauren is a home maker. She has a pretty relaxed lifestyle and gets to work on a few art projects besides cooking and the chores of a regular household. She wakes up by around 7 am and starts to cook for her husband who has to leave for office by 9 am. After her husband leaves for office, she does the laundry and cooks the lunch meal. She then settles down to work on her art project. She takes a short nap in the noon and towards the evening she goes for music classes.
Although Lauren has a pretty relaxed life style, there are several design opportunities to make a much better experience of her life and time. She could have an alarm clock that emits the fragrance of coffee and once she wakes up the app in her phone should send a command to turn on the water geyser to make hot water for her bath. She should have an app on her phone that tells her on when is the best time to work on her art projects and how time she could afford to spend each day towards her projects without affecting her other household chores.
I had to identify design breakdown and opportunities as part of the need finding process
Point of View :
A sound sleep each day is still a dream for many. Sleep deprivation has been attributed to several harmful medical conditions including unstable mental health. Our lives & profession should be weaved around good sleep and not the other way around! While technology has grown in leaps and bounds, very little has been done to keep it human centred and help humans get a sound sleep. It will be of immense help if we could identify design opportunities to develop technology that assist in finding the right amount of adequate sleep for each human.
I had done user testing with several people using usertesting.com and received feedback which was very valuable
On the whole, it was a great experience as part of the capstone project set up by UC San Diego’s design lab set up in partnership with Instagram.
I truly learnt what it takes to design rich user experiences and get to the core of Interaction Design as an emerging field of design.
