If you're one of the roughly 35% of people who describe themselves as regular sleepers, great! But chances are that someone close to you has suffered from a sleep issue at some point in their lives.

Insufficient or poor sleep is not just a public health and safety crisis in the making, it's also quite expensive. A 13% jump in mortality rates, tens of thousands of hours of lost productivity & up to $680 billion in GDP loss (Why sleep matters – The economic costs of insufficient sleep, 2017).

Tara, Kryo's co-founder, is a self-proclaimed sleep geek. Talking to her will confirm this and more. Throughout the course of this project, we did just that. And while we learned a lot from her own wealth of knowledge on the subject of sleep, we also conducted external interviews with 12 people from all walks of life across United States. Authors, construction workers, finance consultants and retail workers (more on this later).

Tara's preliminary vision for eep was of a product that helps people achieve lasting quality sleep. From a business point of view, Tara & her husband & co-founder, Todd wanted to position Kryo as a thought-leader and innovator in sleep health. They understandably had a lot of knowledge of their industry and sleep, but when it came to the specifics for eep, they relied heavily on our team's expertise at MetaLab.

We had our project kickoff in MetaLab's HQ in Vancouver and spent 3 days brainstorming and through our kickoff activities, learning as much as we could about Tara's vision & about sleep as an epidemic. I also had my first taste of oysters at one of our team dinners with Team Kryo during the kickoff, but I digress.

Tara was in the middle of working on a book when they came to us, and was happy to share with us tons of little tips that her research had shown could positively impact our sleep – from magnesium supplements & boxed breathing exercises to alternative medicine. We quickly realized that at a high level, they were banking on us to come up with a way to organize and present all this raw information in consumable way that doesn't just feel like a blog post or a listicle.

It's incredibly hard to overstate the impact that poor sleep has on people's personal & professional lives. I have personally suffered from it at various points over the course of my adult life. Almost everyone we interviewed had personal experience some form of sleep issue and with trying out numerous remedies to combat these with varying degrees of success and more worryingly, with rampant inconsistency. One particularly heartbreaking interview to watch was that of a person who has been suffering with chronic insomnia for about 30 years, surviving on 3-4 hours of sleep on most days.

The health & wellness industry has seen a massive rise in popularity over the past couple of years, a trend which will likely continue for the foreseeable future. This has led to a wide spectrum of apps and services that target health conscious people looking to improve their lives. In short, the market is extremely saturated with digital products that claim to help with sleep & wellness. We spent a lot of time looking at apps in this space to not just understand what the competition was up to, but also understand any potential gaps that our work could fill. I was responsible for researching apps in the mindfulness space from a visual and product philosophy point of view.

During this time, I also spent some time exploring potential features that we'd shortlisted during our kickoff. These are mostly meant to be thought starters for brainstorming with the stakeholders and for beginning technical limitation conversations with our dev team. While most of this gets thrown out, the ideas that we explore here help set us up for any future work.

We knew from the kickoff that eep would be a content heavy app, essentially a repository of possible sleep interventions. And not all of it is net new information. A quick google search for 'sleep tips' would show you countless blog posts filled with information. The challenge here was to present sleep interventions in a way that feels more personalized to a person's very specific needs & isn't just another laundry list of things to look at for 2 minutes when you install the app and then forget about it.

During our conversations with Tara, we noticed that we kept coming back to the fact that any long term sleep improvements would need a gradual learning curve for it to be actually useful. One simply couldn't expect to learn how to fix their sleep overnight, and it'd be misleading for eep to even hint at something like this. Tara had also shared with us her own personal recommendations to the many people who had asked her for help with their sleep.

We used all these insights, interviews & jam sessions and came to the following conclusions:

1. We'd need to teach people about sleep in order to help them understand how they can sleep better
2. People need to be able to measure their sleep to understand if they're making progress
3. We need to provide additional value to people than just a list of things they can do

I collaborated with my design lead, Geordie, to explore potential flows that incorporated what we had learned so far. After many rounds of feedback, arrived at the following vision principles for the 30 Day Challenge:

1. Community Oriented
2. Gradual
3. Coached
4. Personalization

The philosophy of eep that we defined was a 30 day, 5 phase challenge. In short, each phase give people some sleep tips which start off generic and widely applicable, and each phase would end with people going through a phase reflection that would allow them to add the tips that worked for them to their routine along with adding the tips for the upcoming. Tips came in all shapes and sizes, from supplements to physical exercise and people would be able to track their progress on their sleep and these tips through the 30 day challenge and our hope was that at the end of the 30 days, people would have a routine that they were comfortable with committing to for a long time.

While all our older explorations had some form of a gradual learning curve or other, the 30 Day Challenge added some much needed finality to the learning process. With the green light from Team Kryo, we got heads down into product experience.

An important caveat during these foundational activities was who were making decisions for – sleep sufferers or sleep optimizers. Our research had indicated that a challenge experience could be a great motivator for sleep optimizers, but might have a detrimental effect on a sleep sufferer's motivation to give this a shot.

To that effect, we spent time with the question – how might we set people up for success?

As the first and most frequent touch point, the dashboard was a place where we wanted to embody the challenge experience, provide the right actions and give a clear understanding of progress. We iterated on the dashboard throughout the course of the project, incorporating our learnings and progress on the other fronts of the app.

While the dashboard focussed on the granularities of the challenge, I worked on this view as a place for people to view their progress through the entire challenge and review previous completed tips and check-ins and get a bird's eye view of the challenge.

The sleep tips are at the very core of the eep challenge experience. It was envisioned as the fundamental building block that people would incrementally add to their phase and (ideally) incorporate into their daily routines. The tip page was designed with the following in mind:

1. Background on what its recommendation is
2. The science behind it
3. Social proof
4. Steps needed to implement it
5. Related reading material

I explored & iterated on the tip view, tip customization, scheduling & in-app tip experiences (such as journaling, meditation & breathing exercises). I also prototyped the core flows of the more interactive tips.

As with most projects at MetaLab, when we are close to finalizing the wireframes, we spend a week long sprint exploring various visual directions rooted in our branding exercises from the project kickoff, our discussions with the clients and competitive analysis. Putting it like that makes it sounds very measured and scientific, which it is to a large extent. But this is also the space for us to go wild with any hunches we might have. It's an incredibly fun process filled with moodboards, color palettes, choosing the right typeface and adding that bit of delight.

Using our initial explorations as a guide, we updated the initial design styles to better support the product. During the exploratory hifi sprints, the entire team explored and fed back on each others work and we ended up with an iterated version of one of my explorations that heavily relied on dynamic gradients as the primary visual artefact for the dashboard.

Eep being a text heavy app experience, I relied on friendly & readable typefaces and subtle use of shadows and cards for the hierarchical benefits they afforded. After the green light from the clients, we iterated on and applied the visual direction across the rest of the wireframes.

In a primarily text based app, revolving around sleep – accessibility was an ongoing conversation for us from the get go. One of the starter sleep tips that eep recommended was restricting sources of blue light – like your phone, at least an hour before bed time. We made efforts towards taking into account potential touch points for eep, like a person waking up in the middle of the night and looking to eep for help. To that effect, we even designed a 'night mode' with extremely limited functionality, in a primarily dark interface to lower the impact of a screen on the person's sleep. For day time usage, we leveraged iOS's 'High Contrast' system accessibility setting and came up with an updated colour palette for users of that setting. Along with this, we also strived for AA level contrast (Based on WCAG 2.0 guidelines) on text based content.

MetaLab also worked on developing an alpha version of the app, which focused on the interaction heavy portions of eep. Tara, Todd & the rest of Team Kryo were consistently pleased with our work. The app is currently in a private alpha, and is slated to go public in 2021.

Communities are hard to do well. Beware scope creep. That is all.
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On more than a couple of occasions throughout the project, we lacked directional and content guidance from the clients. It was definitely stressful at first, but over time we got a better understanding of the way Tara thinks and we adapted our process.

One of my favourite parts of eep (& my time at MetaLab so far in general) was the collaboration between design & development. The end product looked as good as it did purely because of our tight communication lines and the enthusiasm around trying to stay true to our designs.
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Due to the periods of the project where it felt like we didn’t have enough to work with, we were inadvertedly forced to work around those perceived limitations. In retrospect, those periods were frequently ripe with creativity from our side.
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A large part of eep’s design was driven by content, and understandably so. This was a bit of a new one for me, having previously worked on apps and platforms that don’t rely as much on content as this one. And for that, I’m very grateful.