04.10 + 04.12: Sketching + Prototyping
Refined Service Proposition
Rhythms is a service that offers improved sleep quality at home and while traveling by intelligently regulating your sleep regimen through procedurally generated music. Unlike Brain.fm, Rhythms intelligently adapts music to a user’s individual sleep patterns in real-time to produce better sleep quality.
User Survey Results
Last week we sent out a survey in hopes of better understanding people’s sleep habits and how they relate to travel. We found some things that will help us going into prototyping and validated the need for our service concept. We’ve outlined the following insights from the survey:
There is a difference in sleep quality when traveling, as compared to home.
We found that in the individual responses to our survey, almost everyone noted a difference in sleep quality when traveling as opposed to when at home. In some cases, this was a positive difference, but in more cases it was a negative difference (meaning they slept worse when traveling). On average the quality of someone’s sleep when traveling is a 6.3 (on a scale of 1–10) but a 6.9 when at home. While this difference is somewhat small, at an individual level, the people who are experiencing a drop are experiencing a bigger drop in quality. But the increase in sleep quality some people experience may be attributed to the fact that they are on vacation, and therefore more relaxed than at home. This tells us that there transition from home to travel is an important moment to address, and perhaps we should focus more so on people traveling for work than for vacation.
People are already trying music and white noise as sleep interventions.
In our survey, we found that 42.9% of respondents are already trying music or white noise as a method for helping them fall asleep. Also, 28.6% are using a sleep tracking app of some sort. This information tells us that the groundwork for our service is already there for our users. If people are already using music and sleep tracking apps, by combining those two tools we can create a service that people will desire and find value in.
There are a few reasons for poor sleep.
The two biggest reasons people listed for poor sleep quality were “stress” and “personal / work schedule.” This information is will be helpful in designing our touchpoints to address these causes of poor quality sleep. We can put a focus on music to help destress people and to help create a better sleep schedule within the constraints of their personal and work schedules.
People value sleep a tremendous amount.
60% of our respondents rated how important their sleep quality as 10/10. Another 25% rated it as 9/10. While, this is not necessarily surprising, since sleep is a necessity in everyone’s lives, it is helpful. Now that we are confident people value sleep as much as they do, we can attempt to tap into that when marketing and describing our service to potential users. If we can position ourselves as being able to improve the quality of something someone values immensely in their life, we can convince them to use our service.
When traveling, people mostly stay in hotels.
And finally, 70% of our respondents stated that they most commonly stay in a hotel when traveling (as opposed to staying in an Airbnb or with family/friends). While Airbnb and other informal hospitality arrangements are on the rise, hotels are still the dominant mode. This validates our assumption that partnering with the hospitality industry is both a good place to start in forming partnerships and will bring value to our users.
Full Service Blueprint
This week we finalized completed our initial service blueprint, which starts at service setup, goes into the at-home sleep experience, and then into the travel sleep experience.
Ecosystem Diagram
Touchpoint Sketching + Prototyping
This week we began sketching out the touchpoints we plan to prototype. In testing these prototypes, we intend to focus specifically on the experience of going to bed utilizing the Rhythms system (this will involve interaction with the system hardware as well as the app) and to a lesser extent, the experience of unboxing the system and of obtaining sleep data.
App
The app will be a dominant touchpoint for our users, so this is an important aspect for us to prototype and user test.
The intial at-home experience involves system onboarding as well as the start of a baseline sleep period in which sensors determine an individual’s “normal” sleep patterns. Users are introduced to the system, asked to provide some basic information, prompted to sync their hardware, given feedback about their sleep, and provided with a recommended “rhythm” or regimen for improving their sleep. The flow involved in preparing for bed is detailed further below.
On an average night at home, users can begin their sleep regimen in the app, which plays music while they prepare for bed and then aids in the process of falling asleep. If the hardware detects excessive motion during the night, the app automatically fades in music to ease the user back into sleep. Based on an approximate desired wake-up time, the system also plays music to wake them up, establishing both bedtime and morning routines. The app also prompts the user to provide feedback as to the quality of their sleep, improving the system’s ability to accurate assess the efficacy of a particular regimen. If the user would like to see the type of music being played in relation to their recent sleep quality data, they can view that as well.
As users prepare to travel (especially when changing time zones) they can input an upcoming trip and the Rhythms system will help smooth the shock of jetlag by suggesting adjustments to sleep routine. For example, if a traveler is preparing for a trip to an international destination in several days, the app will suggest that they begin their sleep routine earlier or later to smooth the transition to the new time zone.
To iterate on these initial sketches, we’re currently in the process of creating Sketch wireframes of these workflows to test with users in the form of InVision prototypes. Our research questions include:
How can we design our app to integrate seamlessly with a user’s bedtime routine?
How much feedback and transparency would users like in our service? (in terms of the mechanisms behind the music)
Research Portal
In order to explore sleep treatment options that don’t require medication or intervention from a trained medical professional, researchers can obtain data sets from Rhythms. In our research portal, sleep researchers can submit requests for data collected by the system correlating sleep quality and music characteristics.
