SnoozeMaster

Product Demo Video

Watch our demo video below, from the perspective of a new user. Narration by me!

What was the process?

Initial Design Question

Due to the the time and resource constraints of this project, we had to limit our project scope to graduate students at the UW. This led to our initial design question: how can we help graduate students at the University of Washington form better sleeping habits?

Understanding the Problem Space

We started with a 25-question survey to a) determine the relevance of this problem to UW graduate students and b) identify the level of interest students had in forming better sleeping habits. We then conducted a literature review to reinforce our knowledge of sleep health. Finally, we conducted 6 user interviews to gain deeper insight into our target population's needs and wants in relation to sleep health and habits.

Research Goals

• Determine the relevance of sleep health as a problem to UW graduate students
• Understand the topic of sleep health
• Identify deeper needs and wants from our target users

Key Research Insights

• 100% of survey respondents think their sleep habits could be better
• Users want to learn more about sleep health
• Requirements for best sleep health are highly individualistic
• Users are interested in using technology for understanding and improving sleep
• Users want to be incentivized to develop and maintain sleep habits

Redefining the Design Question

From our research, we identified that our target users were indeed interested in sleep health. One strong theme emerged: users want to make a change to their sleep habits but do not know in what direction to direct their efforts. However, we also found that best sleep health varied from person to person.

With this in mind, we realized that no matter what their personal goals or needs are, educating users about sleep will ultimately help them make decisions about the best sleep habit for themselves. This led to our redefined design question: how can we educate UW graduate students about forming better sleeping habits?

Ideation

We came up with a few design goals after analyzing our key research insights. Our solution should:

• Educate users about sleep health.
• Have a low barrier to entry so taht users of all sleep knowledge levels can use our design.
• Be able to address a wide range of users' sleep needs.
• Be technological in nature.
• Be fun! Incentivize users to sleep.

Using these goals, we sketched out our ideas ranging from games to physical devices. Below are a few of our sketches.

From our initial ideation sketches, we picked 3 ideas we thought most aligned with our design goals and resketched them. The resketches are shown below. Ultimately, we picked the RPG idea because it aligned with our goals while being a challenging solution.

Storyboarding

From this RPG idea, I drew storyboards for key scenarios in which users would employ our solution. The image below depicts a user who is unmotivated to go to sleep. Upon realizing she receives in-game rewards for hitting sleep targets, she becomes motivated to go to bed.

User Flows

We created user flows for some of the main features of our design. Seeing these flows laid out, we were able to better understand how a user might navigate through the game platform. It also helped us design layouts for each feature. The user flow for the RPG gameplay is shown below.

Mid-fidelity Prototype

Using our storyboards and user flows, we started building out key features for our game platform. We made screens for the onboarding process, homepage, profile, main RPG, daily trivia, and shop. I show some of the wireframes below.

User Feedback and Testing

Usability Testing

We conducted usability tests on our mid-fidelity prototype with sample users from our IMT 540 course. We had our users complete a few tasks:

1. Sign up for the platform and connect a wearable.
2. Navigate to the RPG from home and play both levels.
3. Play the daily trivia question.
4. Save the sleep fact.
5. Navigate through profile.
6. Access the shop and purchase an item.

Findings and Iterations

From the testing, we established a few key areas of confusion among our participants. Below, I show a few changes we made based on user feedback.

High Fidelity Prototype

Incorporating the feedback from our testing, we built our final high-fidelity prototype.

Learning and Takeaways

It was a fun first foray into UX! It was definitely a challenging problem space that my team chose to tackle. Due to time constraints, we didn't have enough time to conduct more user research. We also wanted to build a more robust gameplay experience, but were limited to screens we could implement in Figma. It was my first time designing a mobile application as well. Regardless, due to my own personal love for games, I had a lot of fun building SnoozeMaster.

What went well?

• Successfully designed a fairly complete game platform
• Working well with a full team with complementary strengths
• Game was well-received by both instructor and rest of the class
• Completion of my first UX design project, in an area (gaming) I'm passionate about!

Areas for Improvement

• RPG gameplay could be more mature and not limited to just 3 action choices
• Shop items are currently limited to cosmetic only, but they could be used to give certain stats

Future Work

• Develop the RPG further and add more levels
• Incentivize with leaderboards, badges, and awards
• Expand use of currency and enhance utility of shop items