
Social Rhythm Therapy For Sleep
Support for Users of Social Rhythm Methods to Help People with Sleep Challenges
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Student Project Solo Design Challenge
February 2023-August 2024
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I, Barbara Patton, am the Lead UX Designer, from concept to planning, research to wire framing, content management to high resolution prototyping.
Summary
This school project originated as a sleep improvement app.
I thought I knew a lot about sleep hygiene because I have a sleep disorder and had been in sleep hygiene classes.
I used my existing knowledge to begin the project, and finished my class assignment focusing on sleep hygiene.
About six months later, I was still having my own sleeping challenges and attended a class taught by a sleep physician for night owls. There, I discovered that most of my ideas were outdated. I learned that sleep hygiene is only part of the picture and that to attain better sleep patterns, the person needs to focus on total health. Regulating the biological functions, in addition to sleep hygiene is the key.
So I went back to the drawing board.
The Challenge
No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t get my sleep to regulate. My doctor told me that my condition is genetic, a circadian rhythm sleep disorder, delayed sleep phase type. Constantly fighting my natural rhythm to fit in with the world is an ongoing struggle.
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An irregular circadian rhythm can have a negative effect on a person’s ability to sleep and function properly, and can result in a number of health problems. A recent study suggested that the night-owl type might have a greater predisposition to health problems. This study emphasizes the great impact circadian rhythms have on health and functioning. It was found that Interpersonal and Social Rhythm Therapy, also directly affect circadian rhythms.
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My doctor recommended Social Rhythm Function Therapy for my sleep disorder. I was motivated to create an app that would help me track the Social Rhythm functions that my doctor recommended I track in order to improve my sleep and overall health.
These functions include rising, starting work, first movement, fasting, turning off screens, and bedtime. It is extremely challenging to make all of these changes. I wish is to create an app that will support me, and people like me keep up the effort over time.
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It is a tough challenge to re-regulate after becoming dis-regulated. I am designing this app to support people who are attempting to create a more biologically regulated lifestyle.
The Process ​
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I wanted to create a sleep app for a beginner UX design study project. I chose sleep because I am a night owl who struggles with sleep. I had taken a few classes about improving sleep at my sleep doctor's office, so I had some knowledge to begin with. I wanted to create an app that would make tracking sleep easy and fun. I also wanted to provid some education about sleep hygiene. I wanted to introduce some gamification elements to help with motivation.
I began by creating a proto-persona and describing their challenges with regulating sleep.
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I did some thinking about sleep challenges using spectrums and foursquare:
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Then I created crazy eights brainstorming sketches using the knowledge I had about sleep hygiene and some online research.
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That led to rough draft prototypes, which were shown to people to get feedback and interview them. I chose four areas to focus on: Builing an escape nest, playing soothing sounds, breathing exercises and "self love" before bedtime. I had the idea that many people delay going to bed if they are lonely, and I wanted to find a way to tempt people into bed...such as an AI bedtime companion or the idea that spending some alone time with oneself for self love could be important.
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​​​​​​​​​I gathered the results onto sticky notes and organized the comments from participants. I got some results that I should have known better about, such as people don't like to read blocks of text. I got some results that didn't surprise me. I got some good ideas for a whole separate app. And I got some results that did surprise me.
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These that didn't surprise me were that everyone felt that they were not getting enough sleep because of spending time on their phone. It did surprise me that even though none of my respondants had heard of sleep hygiene, each one already had a bedtime routine.
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​People liked the breathing exercises, sleep sounds, escape nest and the self love section. However, the self love section became quite controversial. Shoud I have been surprised. No, I wasn't.​ But I was surprised when people told me that they would prefer to have fewer choices.
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About the self-love section, people had a mostly positive feeling about it. Except that they ​didn't think it should be in this app. They thought it should be an app on it's own, for adults only, and that it should include some ASMR. I decided to remove it.
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At this stage, I began the Night Owl class and had an epiphany that I shouldn't just be focusing on sleep, but on Social Rhythm Therapy. At that point I went back and redesigned the app to include biorhythm tracking, educational information, and gamified motivators.
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Here is a link to the tracking flow wireframes;
https://www.figma.com/proto/P1z1NcNbd80rZTv3hS1ry5/Life-Rhythms-Goal-Setting-Flow?t=rna6aomrDR6h6OJi-1
This is a photo of the early wireframes in progress:​​​​​​​​​​​​
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I conducted a competitive analysis and found that there were a lot of useful sleeping aps already out there. But I didn’t see any using the same methods of Social Rhythm Therapy.
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I added some gamification to support the users, and got some feedback from my instructors and classmates. Next, I need to create a functioning prototype to test on night owls again.
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Here is a link to the reward flow wireframes:
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The Solution
I created a design that simply tracks the timing of six functions: waking, beginning of work, school, caregiving or whatever occupies a person, first movement of the day, the end of eating, or “fasting” for the day, turning off screens and time getting into bed. I added some explanations of how regulating each of these functions can help a persons heath, but framed them as “super powers”, adding a gamification aspect to the app.
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Here's an image of the low res protoype flow for the tracking reminder and reward process:
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Results
The main thing I learned as a designer, on this project, is that something can completely change directions during the design process. My biggest challenge is to integrate the gamification part of the product so it’s not just an adjunct, but part of the whole design. Here are a couple of screens with my visual design overlay. This is still a work in progress.
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