Summary

Tracking college students’ sleep patterns can help improve individual behavioral choices and allows the opportunity to make large scale policy changes to support students’ needs. I and a partner worked to research, design, prototype and evaluate an app-based data collection tool for students to self-report their sleep patterns.

Goal

To research, design, and evaluate an app-based data collection tool to let students record sleep data, and provide a means to collect crowd-sourced data for a citizen science project.

Industry & Audience

• Industry: IT; Health management; citizen science
• Audience: Students at the University of Washington

Constraints

• We had roughly 8 weeks to do this in, since it was part of required coursework.
• We had no prior knowledge of citizen science or sleep-based studies.

My Role

• One in a team of two.
• Conducted half the contextual inquiries
• Helped design the initial layout, and gave design suggestion on first set of prototypes
• Designed and prototyped the layout and interactions for final interactive prototype (in Figma and Adobe XD).

Process

• Identified and researched the design space of student sleep, potential health effects of lack of sleep, and various other studies designed to collect this type of data.
• Conducted 3 contextual inquiries with students about their use of sleep trackers, their planning of their schedule, and their use of other apps for health tracking.
• Used extensive literature review and contextual inquiries, and designed initial prototype in Balsamiq with validated measures and data collection formats from previous studies.
• Conducted longitudinal quantitative evaluations with prospective users to evaluate whether they remembered to submit data each day (using a low-fidelity paper prototype).
• Conducted a focus group session with other users, to gauge opinions of different design choices and motivational features.
• Modified designs and created high-fidelity, interactive prototypes in Figma and Adobe XD.
• Presented entire design project and offered suggestions for future development.

See the Figma prototype here.

Key Insights

When designing a tool to collect data everyday, make everything as automatic as possible.

In an attempt to keep the tool as simple and low-tech as possible, the initial design to collect sleep data required students to tap a timer ‘on’ as they were about to go to bed, and ‘off’ as soon as they woke up. But from longitudinal user evaluations conducted with low-fidelity prototypes, we found users would almost never remember to do both. Our revamped design recorded periods of phone inactivity and asked users later in the day whether the recorded period was correct.