User Research Report

User Research Report

User Research Report Published by D&NA

Summary

Our project aims to address the common issue of oversleeping by providing a streamlined and social solution. Recognizing that people spend a significant portion of their lives sleeping and that frequent snoozing can be counterproductive, our team is dedicated to exploring innovative ways to help users kick start their days.

Our proposed design involves creating an alarm system that goes beyond waking users up; it encourages them to complete a set of tasks before the alarm stops ringing. Additionally, by incorporating a social feature, users can interact with friends in the morning, fostering a sense of community and accountability. This approach aims to transform the morning routine into a more engaging and productive experience. To tailor our solution effectively, we have narrowed our target demographic to students and postgraduates. We believe this group, with its often irregular schedules, will benefit the most from a tool that not only addresses oversleeping but also aligns with their dynamic lifestyles. Our goal is to offer a unique and effective solution that not only wakes users up but helps them start their day with purpose and productivity.

Methodology

The two research methods that our team used are anonymous Google Form surveys and interviews. We focused on researching undergraduates and postgraduates. The undergraduates are primarily University of Washington students.

Anonymous surveys allow respondents to freely share their experiences, and our team can get a large amount of data. In the survey, we asked questions regarding the respondents’ backgrounds, the times they sleep and wake up, the usage of alarms, and whether or not they would like to share their morning routines with friends. An important question we asked is their hobbies, to gauge their interests in games because our initial idea is to incorporate a mini game to wake up users. Their hobbies can determine what kind of app our team will make. At the end of the survey, we asked for voluntary participation in a 30-minute interview.

We conducted eight interviews. Our interview questions take a dive in understanding the morning and night routines of the interviewees. These are some of the interview questions we asked:

• What is your night routine? And how does that affect the time you fall asleep?
• How many hours of sleep do you get each night? How do weekends differ from weekdays?
• Besides an alarm clock, how do you wake yourself up?
• How many times do you snooze your alarm clock?
• What time do you wake up?
• What times are your alarms set for?
• Would you say your morning schedule is relatively the same? Please explain.
• How often do you oversleep?
• Do you wish there was a way to be more productive when using an alarm clock?

Key Results

We’ve discovered that the vast majority of survey participants (24/34) used an alarm to wake up in the morning, with the rest scrolling through their phone to wake up or just making themselves sit up in some way. This solidifies our target on making an alarm-based mobile application to help students wake up. Additionally, it gives us an idea about using the phone’s gyroscope to make users actively sit up to turn off the alarm as a way to help them wake up more naturally.

When it comes to snoozing an alarm, the data shows that most people are concentrated on the extremes; a large percentage of people (12/34) didn’t snooze their alarm at all, while a slightly smaller but still large amount of people (8/34) snoozed their alarm more than 3 times a day. This shows a problem with snoozing in general, where once someone snoozes, they are much more likely to keep snoozing their alarms, making the use of an alarm as a way to wake up much less effective. The large majority of participants also claimed that they wanted to drop the habit of snoozing altogether, but did it because it was hard to get up and it can help to gradually wake up through many alarms. Of the two major groups that we collected that had a sample size greater than 3, Business majors (4) had an average snooze count of 3.75, while Computer Science majors (14) had an average of 1.46. While our sample size for business majors is small, there definitely seems to be a much larger problem with snoozing. This could signal that we should target business majors at least alongside STEM majors and the like, which would mean that a math-heavy game-like approach to waking up might not be ideal, and even hurt the adoption of the app. However, since every major had at least 75% of respondents say they enjoy games, we do still think that a sort of game when waking up would be the best course of action instead of a task.

From our interviews, we were able to gather more nuance to certain answers. For example, 30/34 of the respondents said they would not want to share their morning routine with friends. However, when we asked about details from the interviewees, the main issue seemed to be that it was too difficult to share a routine for how important they believed it to be, especially early in the morning. We decided to solve the problem of students waking up at different times by tracking and sharing their alarm times versus when they actually wake up with friends, so friends can hold them accountable asynchronously. Additionally, the second important takeaway was those that snooze their alarms, especially those that snooze often, wish they could drop the habit. These takeaways from our interviews mainly showed us that students do tend to want to wake up more easily, especially by avoiding having to stay in bed or snooze their alarm, and that we could have a good user base sharing morning routines if the experience is frictionless, which is insight we wouldn’t have gotten from our Yes/No question in our normal survey.

Analysis According to AEIOU Framework

Activities: Once they wake up, some users will scroll on social media while some immediately get up to get ready for school.

Environment:

• In the bed
• Dorm/apartment

Interactions: Some interactions might include engaging in a streak system. It’s almost like a reward for not snoozing at all.

Objects: We often see the participants using their phones as alarm clocks. Since the iPhone has an embedded alarm clock, they’re able to create times when they want to wake up.

Users: The survey was strategically distributed through a BAND post, leveraging social networks to reach friends of friends. The target demographic comprised undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Washington. Additionally, post-graduate students were included to investigate potential variations in sleep patterns influenced by full-time employment. Additionally, we wanted the users to incorporate the app with roommates, friends, parents, etc.