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Timeline:

  • July to September 2023

My Role:

  • Solo student project

My Story + Problem

college students fail to get enough sleep and get bad sleeping habits due to phone addiction.

I found phone addiction is severely impacting college student’s sleep. Watching our phone has made our sleeping time become both later and shorter. Resulting in low efficiency and disrupting our plan the next day. This sparked the question: How might we help college students get rid of their phone during sleep time and get a better sleep experience?

Solution

Set Up Notification Alarms And Blocklist In Advanced

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  • Set up the notification alarm and keep getting notified once a while in a duration (depends on your own settings).

  • Set up blocklist to block apps that distract your sleep.

  • After the notification alarm duration, blocklist would start working depending on your settings.

Notify Users Before Sleeping

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  • Prevent users from being lost in phone activities without awareness

  • Remind users to stay away from phone activities before bed. (according to research, at least 30 minutes before bed)

  • Give users a buffer time to relax and prepare for sleep

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Block Distracted Apps During Sleeping

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  • Use proper interventions to help our user get rid of their phone when they fail to self-controlled

  • Prevent users to pick up their phone again and again at night

Find Your Favorite Activities

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  • Provide sleep assistance content for users.

  • Help users to calm down and relax before bed.

  • Provide multiple activities to help users prepare for a good night’s sleep.

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Whitepaper Research

Phone use before bed would make it hard to fall asleep and affect sleep quality.

In order to learn more about the cause and consequences of college student’s sleep problems, I feel the need to dig deeper and get support from the white paper research.

I began to research articles on the topic of phone addiction and sleep. And these are some important quotes I found from my research.

Why It’s Time to Ditch the Phone Before Bed

“The National Sleep Foundation recommends that you should stop using electronic devices, like your cellphone, at least 30 minutes before bedtime”.

Smartphone addiction ruins sleep, study says, but you can fight back （CNN）

“The blue light emitted by your cell phone screen restrains the production of melatonin, the hormone that controls your sleep-wake cycle (aka circadian rhythm). This makes it even more difficult to fall asleep and wake up the next day.”

Competitor Analysis

How well does existing apps help with sleep problems caused by phones? Are they solving the “phone addiction” problem ? To get a more comprehensive picture of the status quo, I conducted the competitor analysis.

The competition mostly focuses on the sleep assistance aspect, but not solving the phone overuse/addiction problems.

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I focus my research on both sleep apps and time management apps. All the sleep apps are focusing on how to sleep better. Their alarms are aiming to wake users up instead of notifying them to go to sleep. And they don’t have Compulsory Measures (blocklist) in order to meet user’s needs. However, the research inspired me that integrating sleeping apps and time management apps together may be a good idea.

User Interviews

"Phone use before bed makes it hard for the user to fall asleep. And failing to fall asleep makes them pick up their phone again, resulting in a vicious circle".

I conducted my research with 11 college students who claim that they have sleep problems due to phone addiction. I asked them questions in order to understand deeper how phone addiction/overuse impacts their sleep. And what consequences they got.

Main Insights

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User Persona

I visualize the insights I get from my user research into this persona. Jeff is a very typical example of those college students struggling between their phone and sleep at night.

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Design

Brainstorm & Basic User Flow

Through the insights of interview and research, I have a deeper understanding of my user and their painpoints. Now it's time to brainstorm some possible solutions. I then started brainstorming the basic flow for the app. The main design challenge is how might I generated all the insights from the research and conducted all the messy information into usable and clear user flow. 

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Sketch & Lo-Fi

After generating the basic user flow, it’s time to sketch out the initial low-fidelity wireframes. These Low-Fi helped me build a foundation for some main pages and further design.

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Usability Testing

For my low-fidelity prototype, I conducted unmoderated usability testings with Five college students who claim to have varying degrees of sleep disorders due to smartphone overuse.

The goal is to figure out if the solutions (notification and block approaches)  are accessible and practical for users. And also gathered suggestions and feedback from users based on the current user flow.

Among the 5 users:

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2 of them wish they can also pre-set the sleep assistance while setting the alarm.

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3 of them wish they can also use the blocklist whenever they want.

Insights:

  • The original blocklist would only be activated when alarm(notification) time ends. It may be better to allow users to use the blocklist at any time.

  • Adding a sleep assistance pre-set feature may enhance user experience.

MID-FI & HI-FI

 After user testing and careful review on the user flow, I refined my prototype and built out mid-fidelity wireframes. And these mid-fidelity wireframes eventually led me to HI-FI.

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(Here are part of the MID-FI for the mian user flow)

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The Final Work

Design Guide

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Design Iteration

Major Improvement Based on Feedbacks

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  • It’s easier and faster for user to set up sleep assistance in advance.

  • User don’t want to find or select sleep assistance when it’s time to sleep.

As a result, I add the Sleep Assistance Card on the alarm setting page .

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  • Based on the insights from user interview, I considered user need a alarm to notify them it’s time to sleep.

  • however, through the follow up interview and user feedback, I realize user need multiple times of notifications, the alarm should last for a period.

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How long should the period last？

  • Based on white paper research, it should be at least 30 minutes.

  • This alarm is aiming to help user stop phone activities as soon as possible.

As a result, I redesign the Alarm time setting to provide a whole notification period for users.

Conclusion

I wanna say to myself "Don't be afraid of making mistakes".

At the beginning of the design phase, I think I made a mistake of being too concerned about making mistakes. I stopped actually doing something or making any progress, I was planning and thinking all the time. That was not right. It’s impossible for us to make anything perfect at the first time. We would eventually have something wrong.

 

Instead of being afraid of making mistakes, I should embrace every failure we’ve been through. They are not mistakes but our leaders through the right path.

 

We can only seek the right direction after iterating again and again with our users. And I feel I can also better emphasize and understand my user through this process.

If I had more time, I would......

  • I would explore more interventions (simple games or intera to stop users from opening their app again).

  • Explore more about sleep assistance.I would do more user research on the sleep assistance categories, in order to find out more contents that can help our user to relax and sleep.(I heard a great idea of using the idol's voice to help users relax).

  • I would explore more possibilities at the sleep data and sleep quality areas.

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