Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

Sleep Habits: Ideate Your Solution

Khalid Ahmad, Christine Chen, Dhruvik Parikh, Kevin Penner, Elena Wagenmans

A Recap of the Intervention Study

As our intervention studies winded down, we started to glean key learning points based on the feedback of our 11 participants. As a reminder, here is what the intervention entailed:

Our study consisted of two interventions to try and establish a nighttime routine for participants.

1. Set reminders on your phone as context prompts to remind participants about their goal of forming a routine. The intention is to disrupt the cycle of procrastination and overwork that usually happens during these times. Example set of reminders: 7 pm (5 hrs before bed, have dinner), 9 pm ( 3 hrs before bed, go shower), 11 pm (1 hr before bed, go wind-down)
2. Pick a wind-down activity to conduct every night. This can include things like reading, playing a game, listening to music, or anything that relaxes your mind. We also had participants anchor this activity to something that is already a part of their nightly routine, such as brushing their teeth. By using an action prompt and anchoring, we hoped that participants would be more likely to adopt the wind-down activity as a habit.

Takeaways / Interesting Notes

• 3 participants failed to even start the intervention study. 1 participant quit midway through. As opposed to the baseline study where we had all participants (9 of them) complete the full study.

From the reminders intervention

• Reminders were annoying for many participants. One participant felt like the structure was too rigid and that that it actually added on more stress in dealing with sleep. Another participant noted that “the reminders are annoying” for all 5 days of the study.
• Especially for those that already have a fairly typical night routine, the reminders felt unnecessary or unhelpful. Only one participant noted an instance where a reminder actually helped them to remember to eat dinner at 7 pm.
• Our main takeaway: don’t bother people with too many notifications / alarms / reminders. Context prompts can be helpful, but not if it means stressing out the user with notifications. This is something we’ll have to heavily consider during the ideation phase.

Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

From the wind-down intervention

• Those that found the most success had chosen activities that they enjoy and will do regularly anyways. These activities included reading (2 participants) and playing video games (2 participants). Of these 4 participants, they were able to do the wind-down activity at least 4 out of the 5 evenings of the intervention study.
• The common theme between these 4 participants was that the activity already had a natural fit into their regular schedule and that it was something they actually looked forward to doing every night. One participant noted excitement for reading every night since the book they were reading was interesting.
• Our main takeaway: find ways to highly incentivize prioritizing sleep. Is there a way to make them look forward to it?

Photo by Nicole Wolf on Unsplash

Ideation

After synthesizing the intervention study, journey maps, and system map, we then proceeded to brainstorm prototype solutions.

Of these ideas, we chose 9 to flesh out a bit with half-sheets. For each of them, we included a quick sketch to visualize what the idea would look like.

Of these 9 ideas, we narrowed it down to 3 potential prototypes to explore.

Anchored Sleep

Half-sheet by Kevin Penner

What are we testing with this prototype?

• Efficacy of a “sleep is efficient” mindset for students by building it into the daily schedule alongside academic and other commitments
• Building desired habits through notifications (context prompts) rather than personal or action prompts

Watch Monitoring

Half-sheet by Khalid Ahmad

What are we testing with this prototype?

• Benefits of increased user awareness of when they are doing high energy activities too close to bed
• Effects of reduced high energy activities before bed on time needed to get to sleep and overall sleep quality
• Users’ willingness to change behavior as the result of adaptive prompts instead of regularly scheduled ones

Night Routine Generator

Half-sheet by Dhruvik Parikh

What are we testing with this prototype?

• The impact of a thoroughly structured and explained evening routine on user mentality about sleep
• Whether an established structure is enough to encourage good habits and mindfulness throughout the evening