Prepare to sleep
Guiding users to better sleep with a personalized wind down routine to increase sleep quality and daily app engagement
Company
Sleep Reset
Role
Sole Product Designer
Time
2023
Wind down routines are an essential part of sleep hygiene
Wind down routines are practiced an hour or two before bed and consist of various activities to calm the mind and relax the body. They can include meditations, journaling, reading a book, taking a warm bath, stretching, and more.
Over 50% of our sleep-deprived users don't practice a wind down routine. Moreover, Sleep Reset's app recommends users to incorporate wind down routines with little follow up support or guidance.
By creating a consistent evening wind down experience, we aim to increase daily engagement with the app with the ultimate goal of increasing trial-to-subscriber rates.
Following sleep science for an effective wind down
Based on sleep science, some activities are more effective depending on the user's current emotional and sleepiness states. For example, if a user feels anxious about their sleep, a journaling prompt aimed at cognitive restructuring would be more effective at calming their mind.
It's imperative that users reflect on their sleepiness level and emotions before building a wind down routine.
Designing for adoption through effortless routine creation and customization
Implementing a new routine means forming new habits, which is no easy task. In order to prioritize feature adoption and stickiness, we wanted to make it as effortless as possible to build a new routine that was effective for a first time user. This meant providing some form of pre-built or auto-generated routine that users can immediately jump into based on their sleepiness and emotional state.
Users also have strong preferences on which wind down activities they enjoy. Some practice the same routine every night while others seem to be more flexible and experimental. Some have routines that only include one activity while others do multiple activities in a single night.
These insights guided us towards building a wind down routine experience that was easily generated, customizable, and repeatable.
Driving repeat engagement through efficacy, gamification, and reminders
To drive consistent engagement of this new feature, we wanted to use the wind down feature's completion flow to remind users of its effectiveness while also gamifying with streaks and setting push notification reminders.
To show efficacy, at the end of a wind down session we prompt users to re-evaluate their sleepiness level. If they are sleepy enough for bed, we show them a session summary with the progression of their sleepiness level. If the user is still not sleepy, we suggest additional activities to help.
