wynd: promoting good sleep habits by wynding down

tools: Miro, Figma

what I did: research, baseline study, intervention study, user testing, prototyping, heuristically evaluating, high-fidelity prototyping

when: January - March 2021

Context

College is a pivotal time for developing good sleep hygiene. Competing academic and social needs, plus the norm of late nights has reinforced the idea that sleep is low-priority. But the consequences are tough; a poor sleep schedule can result in low-quality sleep which in turn can lead to academic underperformance. Unsurprisingly, there are plenty of research papers on sleep, however, proposed solutions don’t really seem to work. Existing tools aren’t sustainable and have mixed results when it comes to actually stimulating behavior change. With our solution, we wanted to set up our users up for success through habit building and effective prompts.

Understanding Behavior

To understand our users’ behavior, we asked 9 students and recent grads to track numerous data points over the course of a week, including caffeine intake, exercise, naps, and typical bedtime routines. To better visualize this data, we created individual journey maps and personas.  

School and social anxiety would often cause students to pile on activities, tasks, and distractions late into the night, at the cost of poor sleep, creating a negative feedback loop. While this wasn’t a particularly new finding, we did discover that there is also a positive feedback loop, like the relationship between sleep education, or being aware of one’s sleep habits and quality, having a nighttime routine, and experiencing high-quality sleep. For our intervention study, we decided to focus on this positive loop, which we hypothesized can actually displace the negative feedback loop of nighttime chaos.

Intervention Study

To help identify possible solutions, we conducted two interventions to test our preexisting assumptions about wind-down activities and reminders.

1. Setting reminders on your phone to tell you to make/eat dinner, start wrapping up your work, and go to bed. The goal was to use these context prompts to remind participants about their goal of forming a routine, and to disrupt the cycle of procrastination and overwork that usually happens during these times.

2. Picking 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.

Some participants found the context reminders useful in “forcing” them not to work on school work until the moment they get to bed, but others who had better sleep routines during the baseline did not find the reminders particularly helpful. Instead, they were more focused on the wind down activity, choosing to play a particular game or listening to music. Of those that were more activity-focused, the participants who chose various wind-down activities each day tended to have more irregular sleep quality than those who chose to do the same activity each night. 

Our Solution

We created a watch-based app with 4 key tasks: 

• Introductory Onboarding Survey

• Nudges to start the bedtime routine with wind down activities

• Overactive notifications for when heart rate exceeds a level too close to bedtime

• Checking in on wind-down habit tracking every month and re-syncing of settings (same as onboarding survey) 

Introductory Survey

Overactive Flow

Wynd-Down Flow