Researching the sleeping experience

Last weeks I have been busy with my colleagues at USI program discussing about sleeping. The reason why we started to talk about sleep is not any personal problem related to that. Currently we are working on our design case, that is a 10-week project for our professional doctorate course. The design case is a very precious moment in our program since we normally have 2 or 3 weeks to work in projects. During it we can run the whole design cycle and even evaluate different levels of prototypes with users.

My group is paying a lot of attention to the user research phase. So far we have run a survey with 80 participants, have done 6 interviews and 5 diaries. It is impressive how much of research has been done about sleeping, but people still complain about their sleeping habits. Thus in order to understand properly what kind of needs and requirements people have, we thought that we should make use of different tools. It has shown to be worthy.

Recently we had some brainstorms in order to translate the main findings of the user research into concepts. Soon we will evaluate these concepts with users. Our idea is to use a very low-fi prototype to be evaluated in this first moment. Later on we will increase the fidelity of the prototype as we will also add feedback from users.

In the future I will post more details about this project. For now, I would like to leave you with some interesting products we have found during a competitor analysis we have performed.

Take a look at some of them:
Zeo is a new kind of educational tool and motivational program that helps you understand how you are sleeping, reveals habits and behaviors that may be helping or hindering your sleep, and teaches new ways that may help you get a better night’s rest.

SleepPhones are the first headphones for sleeping. Soft and comfortable delivering excellent sound quality through thin speakers, SleepPhones help you fall asleep in bed while listening to nature sounds mixed with a sound technology that guides your brain to sleep. Use SleepPhones to reduce noise from snoring, relieve anxiety, and deepen your sleep.

BeoTime, Bang & Olufsen makes sure that even your basic morning ritual becomes an extraordinary experience. The humble alarm clock has been transformed with remarkable and unobtrusive design and surprisingly practical features, like built-in motion sensor and subtle automatic backlighting. The sleep timer lets you doze off to music or late night programming without a care.