Beddy, your sleep buddy

7 min readOct 8, 2020

A wellness app about meditation and sleep improvement.

The health and wellness industry has been experiencing immense disruption due to advancements in technology these past years and the Wellness Institute want to support a new mobile app to support wellbeing. This project is a proposal of a call for projects*.

With my UX UI designer partner Anne Moreno, we conducted in two weeks researches and prototype to create an MVP following these principles:

The relevance of the solution according to user needs
The thoroughness & completeness of the functionalities
The overall design desirability
The versatility of your design system (to be applied on future apps)

Researches

Thanks to researches we noticed that the most frequent user of health app nowadays are mostly women between 25–35 years old living in big cities, willing to pay for their wellness routine. We also figured that our generation is the most stressed out, and try to spend more time to compensate.

Survey

We did a global survey regarding Wellbeing to have an overview of the trends and guide us to the thematic of the app we wanted to propose. From 30 answers of millennials living in capital, 90% of respondents care about their sleep quality among other wellbeing practice (sport, diet, …) and 70% think that wellness means “spiritual” (meditation and sleep).

So, we decided to focus on the sleep thematic and conducted a more specific survey to understand how people sleep and their habits. On 82 answers, here are the main trends:

Jobs to be done (JTBD)

We also conducted 5 JTBD interviews of people who have troubles when sleeping. Their problems was different, some of them had trouble to fall asleep, other to stay asleep and wake up during the night and others feel always tired, even in the morning.

The common insights we had are that these peoples wanted to be guided, track and analyze their sleep and want to have less stimulation before going to bed to prepare their night properly.

“I would like to return to my childhood sleep”

The problem

Persona

In order to put ourself into the user shoes, we create Julia, a young woman who has a stressful job and troubles to fall asleep. We summarized her needs and frustration into a problem statement:

Julia, who has stressful workdays, needs a way to fall asleep easily and get restful sleep to feel good on her daily life, be efficient on her duties and enjoy her social life.

User Journey Map

We created a user journey map to be (the happy path of our user) to think about the routine of our persona Julia who is a girl having a stressful job before to bed. She practices Yoga Nidra (a type of yoga that relax you and helps you to fall asleep) and use the feature the app propose

The solution

We think about several features through ideation phases (Crazy 8) and vote finally for 4 main features for the MVP. All features are fully personalized and adapted to the user to offer him the best experience and the best night he can have:

The sleep feature to let people see the variation of their sleep phases; they could see the amount of deep sleep, light sleep, REM sleep, and the curve of their previous night. A real tracking.
The alarm is different in two ways than a classic one: there is an intelligent alarm which wake you up during your light sleep phase, it allows you to be less tired in the morning and the second aspect is that you can pick a music from your Soundmap (see below).
A Dreamscape is a total experience through a podcast with sounds and ambiant that you can personalized if you want to. It helps you falling asleep just with noises and a story on a thematic.
The Soundmap is an interactive map where you can listen real nature sounds all over the world. You can also record a sounds that you like ( a sound from your holidays or a voice you like) and you would like to hear before sleeping or you can also download one.

UI part

After all the researches, we came to an app idea that will fit to people who have troubles to fall asleep, to sleep the entire night without waking up and people who feel restless in the morning.

We think about a name to our app: Beddy which means “going to bed” and sounds a bit like “Buddy”: the slogan came itself as: “Beddy, your sleep buddy”.

As a mascot, we choose the Koala because it the animal who sleep the most in the world (23h/24!) but also because it’s peaceful and warm.

Mid-fi wireframes and usability testing

We begin to design our mid-fi wireframes (adapted on Iphone 8) and do some usability testings. Here are the outputs we got:

“The utility of the search bar is not clear”
“On the homepage, do we need to have the news? We would prefer the latest sounds played”
“On the sleep page, the date is not clear, and the time on bed is confusing with the total sleep amount”

We changed several things to our mid-fi to do our highfi but before, we needed a universe, of color, image and things reflecting our values.

We created a moodboard reflecting our values: letting go, the darkness of the night, the nature, the dream and we came to that:

From that, we create our style tile to be consistent in all our high-fi.

We choose dark colors to be kind with the eyes because it’s an app used during the night so we needed less luminous colors, a night blue as a primary, a light green as a secondary color to remind the nature and yellow to reflect the moon as an accent color.

Our mascot is a Koala because it’s the animal who sleep the most in the world, we made an illustration of him and we made it also our logo. The other illustrations are related to the night nature background.

All our buttons are also rounded and in soft colors to remind the smooth of the app.

Desirability tests

We did some high-fi wireframes and test them with 25 peoples to have their insights before going further.

We did a “5 second test” and we were glad to see that the words who came the most to participant when seeing the image was Peaceful for the homepage and Technical for the sleep screen. It was our expectations so we continued in that way with other wireframes.

We finished our high fi wireframe and did an other usability test with 5 users.

Their feedbacks were both about UX…:

“the location or the alarm is hidden and I would prefer have it on the homepage” → we created an alarm icon on the homepage to answer of the accessibility issue
“There are different kind of “add” button” → we made all button consistent

…And about UI:

“all the icon are not filled”
“there are color contrast issues on the progress bar and on the navigation bar” → we create fill icons and change the colors to anwser to the constrat issue

Everything was discussed and taken in account. Check the final result on our prototype made on Figma !