01- Scoping the Problem

The first step to creating a product is knowing what problem you’re solving. I eventually narrowed down my scope to helping young adults get to bed on time. I decided on this through secondary research, competitive analysis, market sizing, and user research.

Secondary Research: Sleep duration is the easiest to influence and measure

Broadly, there are 3 factors to achieving good sleep: sleep quality, sleep timing, and sleep duration. Of the three, I decided to focus on sleep duration because it would be the easiest to influence and measure.

Competitive Analysis: A whitespace opportunity exists

My analysis revealed that $430B sleep aid market and digital sleep apps are either catered to those already with sleep disorders, or focus on the middle 3 stages of the sleep journey, and a whitespace opportunity exists to help people go to bed. At the same time, my user interviews were revealing that this could be a promising space.

Market Size: Around 20% of the adult population

Now that I had uncovered a whitespace opportunity, I wanted to size the market. A quick calculation revealed the total addressable market could be ~20% of the adult population.

02- Understanding the pain points

Next, I had to identify a target market, validate the market need, and understand their pain points. Through a survey (30 respondents) and 7 user interviews, I sought to answer: How many young adults struggle with going to sleep? Why do they delay bedtime? What’s not working with current solutions?

Target Market: Young working professionals

I decided to focus on young working professionals with set wake up schedules due to simplicity, accessibility, and effectiveness.

Survey: Validated user need and an intention-action gap

Our survey validated the user need (86% respondents struggle with going to bed at a reasonable time), and highlighted that there was an intention-action gap (64% acknowledged sleep improves their life and wants to change, yet majority went to bed on time less than 3 days a week, and ultimately slept less than 7 hours).

User Interviews: 3 main barriers to sleep

Through user interviews, surveys and secondary research, I boiled down why people delay sleep into 3 main insights. We decided to focus only on the first two (approach explained below).

1. Revenge Bedtime Procrastination

“a phenomenon in which people who don’t have much control over their daytime life refuse to sleep early in order to regain some sense of freedom during late night hours.” Covid has taken a lot of structure out of people's lives and exacerbated the issue of leaving crucial down time activities to the last minute.

2. No Target Bedtime

Majority of those who struggle with getting to bed on time for 7-9 hours of sleep don’t have a target bedtime.

3. Social Media

80% of survey respondents reported being on social media before bed. Unless something disrupts their experience, they won’t know when it’s bedtime- and even if they see the clock, it’s not obvious how much sleep they're sacrificing at that moment.

Current Solutions: Not robust

The problems with traditional phone alarms or apple sleep are they're not customized, easy to ignore, and don't account for downtime. Manually counting the hours of sleep needed and watching the clock are not robust or sustainable solutions.

03- Setting the Hypothesis

The core hypothesis/ theory of change I had after all this discovery work was: If we can help young adults set and stick to wind-down and sleep times, then they can get 7-9 hours of sleep a night.

04- Deciding on the Solution

After facilitating a series of brainstorming and decision making sessions with my team, we had to decide which strategy we should pursue and which platform we should design for.

After aggregating our ideas into a couple we liked best, I created a quick mockup with our designer so we could test the strategies. Prototype 1 and 3 won in our user tests.

This gave us a couple options in order of technical feasibility for our developer:

• a text bot

• a chrome extension with website blocking capabilities

• a mobile app

Based on value to the user and technical feasibility, we decided on the text bot. We wanted a mobile-first experience given 80% of people are on their mobile phone before bed, and a mobile app wasn’t really necessary to test our hypothesis and would slow us down. Although social media was an interesting insight, it wasn’t one we were technically equipped to address just yet.

The MVP

Pzzow Head helps users set a custom sleep schedule so they can wind-down guilt free and get to bed, and sends them texts they’ll actually listen to.

What sets our product apart:

• Pzzzow helps users SET a wind down time to prevent revenge bedtime procrastination

• Pzzzow helps users STICK to their bedtimes with texts that educates them on the importance of sleep, lets them customize the 'personality' that best fits their motivation style, and uses gamification to encourage streaks and discourage bad behaviour.

How did we get here?

05- Prioritizing features in agile

I prioritized the onboarding experience and the basic text notification functionalities, because this would allow me to test 1) does Pzzzow make SETTING wind-down and sleep times easy and frictionless, 2) are texts enough to help adults STICK to their wind-down time.

I created our backlog under the principles of delivering value and testing as quickly as possible. I combined tasks and our backlog into one, and marked User Stories as “Small” (1-2 days of work), “Medium” (3-4 days), and “Large (5+ days). In retrospect, I would have split our board into two to help declutter, used planning poker to size User Stories, and been more intentional about holding my team accountable to our sprint commitments.

06- Testing and Iterating

The “onboarding” experience

The onboarding experience was critical in exciting potential users about Pzzzow and educating them on our value proposition. Our first round of lo-fis were confusing to users as it wasn’t clear what Pzzzow was or what the information asked would be used for. It also didn’t incorporate all the data we needed in the backend.

After conducting usability tests and encouraging our designer to partake, I challenged her to redesign the onboarding experience with 3 key principles in mind: front-load user value, make it easy, make it frictionless. To do this, I suggested including explanations to educate users, shuffling screens to deliver value first and move the phone number screen last, and also provided her with a user flow to explain the intent of each screen and sample text. Multiple iterations and tests later, we landed on this!

The “text” experience

I created an initial user flow in Miro and designed a value test that would require us to manually send texts to 5 users over 7 days. This flow was barebones, with a mix of sleep facts, jokes, and regular texts.

Overall, although 80% of pilot users claimed they got more sleep than previous weeks, most were neutral about the product, signalling that our barebones product was not enough.

The value test revealed that the sleep facts + sleep goals were well liked, so I expanded on these in the next version. However, 80% of our pilot users started ignoring texts after the 3rd day if it wasn’t working, highlighting that we needed to include more interactivity and bring our ‘edit’ feature up in our backlog.

Adding gamification & interactivity

During the test, one group of users got a text after 7 days asking them how many days they met their sleep goal, while another group recieved these texts every morning.

We found out users preferred the morning texts because it reminded of their goal and motivated them to continue sleep habits. We also heard that users needed more rewards or incentives to keep going, so for version 2 of the user flow I built out our gamification component further, adding streak texts and rabbit hole texts that would differ depending on how many times in a row they hit “NO” or “YES” in the morning. This was designed to enhance interactivity and give Pzzzow a chance to intervene early.

Future development

In the future, I’d like to test our updated MVP to see if the changes made were enough to deliver user value, and test the inclusion of a ‘social app blocking’ capability via a clickable URL. The journey doesn’t end here!