Case Study
Sleepme App 0 to 1
The Problem
Kryo as a company had been around for 5 years before receiving their Series A VC. In that time the co-founders of the company invented a very unique mattress topper that could heat and cool your bed while you sleep. However, the early models were all "dumb" products that could do nothing more than set a single temperature throughout the night.
However, they believed the best way to truly help people sleep would be to utilize an app connected to their hardware via bluetooth that could modulate temperature more precisely throughout the night making multiple temperature adjustments. Not being software developers themselves, they had to rely on freelancers and consultants to build their first app. The named that app "ooler".
Ooler
Ooler was a fine as a proof of concept app. It would allow the user to connect to the device and set a schedule to modulate their temperature all night long. However, bluetooth was very problematic for many reasons, but mainly our users wanted to be able to operate their device remotely away from home when they forgot to turn it off.
Also, like most software cobbled together from multiple vendors, it wasn't built in a manor that would scale. Lastly, and most importantly to me, the UI/UX was quite bad, and need a massive overhaul.
Initial Requirements
In summer of 2020 after series A funding was received an entire team of Designers, Developers, and PM's were hired to create an entirely new app powered by a central cloud that could communicate to all of our customers devices. Sleep.me was born and I was hired as the Digital Design Director in charge of improving the UX and to work with the Devs to build out this entire platform.
While our CEO had a laundry list of features on her wish list, working with the product team, we determined the first features that should be built were a 1:1 replacement for the features already existing in Ooler. This would allow us to sunset Ooler. Those features were: device on-boarding, temperature control, and sleep scheduling. In addition to the base features, an entirely new design system and brand language also had to be created.
Device Onboarding
Ooler had no real onboarding to speak of. There was only one piece of hardware that worked with it. So it was as simple as looking for nearby bluetooth devices, and selecting yours (much like pairing a mouse). However, the long term vision for sleepme was to have multiple pieces of smart hardware, and also to allow multiple users of each device. So user accounts would be needed, provisioning, family control, etc. With that in mind we went to work on user journeys and UX flows that met the business requirements.
Sleep Scheduling
One of the core features required by the app was for user to be able to create their sleep programs to make adjustments to temperature throughout the night (similar to a thermostat schedule for your house). This is the flow we created to set that up.
V1 Dashboard & Temperature Control
After onboarding and sleep schedules were setup, the user would then be taken back to the dashboard, where they could monitor the status of their device and manually override the temperature if needed. Just to fill out the dashboard, at this point we also decided to add a bit of multimedia content that we pulled from our website that our users could access as needed to help them relax.
