Case Study: Designing an app to improve your sleep habits
This is how we helped a market-leading brand use mobile technology to stay ahead of it’s competition, creating an app to help their customers track and improve their sleep quality.
The Challenge
How can a market-leading, innovative brand keep pushing boundaries and stay ahead of it’s competition?
Simba has been manufacturing in the sleep industry for over 40 years and has since sold over 50 million mattresses. They’re UK market-leaders, having flipped the sleep industry on its head with their innovative products. But instead of sitting back and watching the sales continue to roll in, Simba wanted to do something different. Something new and unexpected. They wanted to go beyond sleep products and into a holistic sleep service.
That’s where we came in. And so began our year-long obsession with getting a good night’s sleep.
Our Approach
From concept to research, build to launch, we worked closely with the Simba team to create the Simba Sleep app that is now an integral part of their customer experience.
A great mattress is a huge part of a good night’s sleep, we know that. But it isn’t the only factor. There are so many things that can disrupt your slumber, from light levels to diet and even how much time you spend on your phone before getting off to sleep. What if Simba could go beyond their amazing sleep products and become their customers’ own personal sleep coach?
The Idea: an app to help Simba’s customers track, analyse and improve their sleep.
Research
Being such a widely-loved brand, Simba already had a receptive customer base we could tap into for research and feedback.
First, we needed to figure out what issues people have with their sleep. How could we start to solve sleep problems before finding out what problems we’re trying to solve? Do people have trouble falling asleep? Do they wake up in the middle of the night? How many suffer from specific sleep health issues like insomnia? When we finished our initial research, it became clear that the core functionality of the app would need to be tracking sleep.
This would give us the data to learn about users’ sleep quality and patterns and form the basis for data-led sleep recommendations.
With a solid idea for the app, we put it to the test in a series of focus groups. The main outcome of these sessions was that anything that required extra gadgets to work was a no-go. No hardware or headwear.
Nothing that could disrupt their sleep any further. We’d need to use existing phone functionality to track users’ sleep.
Build, test, launch, improve
Once we’d established the concept, we quickly moved into creating wireframes, user journies and app flows.
We tested these at every stage to make sure we were solving real sleep problems identified by real people. We didn’t want to work on something for months without ever testing it, only to find we’ve solved a problem no-one had and built something no-one actually wanted. After the successful MVP and a few further iterations, we launched version 1 of the app on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
As we all testing weekly with our core test audience, we rolled out an MVP just 3 weeks into the project to a group of beta testers. This meant we could make changes and improvements to the functionality and usability while keeping the time and cost low.
After the successful MVP and a few further iterations, we launched version 1 of the app on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
In just 6 weeks, the app made it into the top 20 in the health & fitness category with a 4.8/5 score and over 10k downloads.
In the first 6 months, the app indirectly contributed to over £135,000 in additional revenue for Simba Sleep and last year, aided their COVID marketing strategy based on user habits.
Some more highlights:
- 15,000 monthly app downloads
- 10,000 monthly active sessions
- 46% track their sleep every night
- 52% daily retention rate
- 32% of all users took the Tryfor8 challenge
Tryfor8 Challenge
Together with Maro Itoje, England’s fastest rising rugby star, and an expert sleep training team, including the likes of Dr. Jamie Roberts and Peta Bee, we have launched the Tryfor8 campaign, encouraging users to hit 8 hours of sleep.
Why? Using data collected from our app we noticed that the UK simply isn’t putting the sleep time in — and it shows. You need about 8 hours a night to be on top of your game, but the average is nearer 6. We’re here to change this.
See more of our work on our website, as well as how we work and ways we can help you grow your brand.
