Initial Research Report

Overview

We decided to focus our project on helping people with their sleep habits and behaviors using the support of friends and family to build better routines. We’ve found that despite the value that a healthy sleep routine can bring to people’s lives, many younger adults struggle with going to bed and getting up at consistent, reasonable times. Healthy habits like a sleep routine can be hard to build, and so we focused our research on not only investigating the relationship young adults have with sleep, but also on whether or not building such habits may become easier with the help of others. Our chosen target audience is young adults, both students and those in the workforce, who struggle with setting healthy sleep habits and are looking to improve them. These habits could involve getting up earlier, going to bed earlier, or setting a better nighttime routine. We are also choosing to target this group due to their consistent interactions with personal devices like phones and their familiarity and comfort with social media applications.

Research & Findings

For our research method we chose to go with interviews, as it was a more personal way to connect with participants. We wanted to dive into their relationship with sleep, how they find personal motivation, what they are motivated by, and what external factors contribute to their current sleep hygiene. The three of us each interviewed four different people in person, over the phone, and over video calls for a total of twelve participants. The interviews lasted approximately fifteen to thirty minutes. The age range for our participants were from nineteen to twenty-eight since we wanted to target young adults. They were either in college or early-career. We asked them about their nighttime and daytime routines, what times they woke up and went to sleep, how they interact with their alarms, and more. Our goal of the interviews was to determine how participants thought about sleep, what would make their sleep habits better, and how their phone plays a part in that relationship. Our findings were very interesting and varied. We did notice that most participants had the intention to be asleep by midnight but most stayed up until one or two in the morning. We also observed that most participants had inconsistent wake up times and snoozed their alarms. Most participants also had multiple alarms set and woke up with one of their last alarms. However, participants with stricter start times struggled less with getting up in the morning. Additionally, almost all participants consistently interacted with their phone and with social media before going to sleep. It was typically the last thing people saw before falling asleep in bed. Lastly, we also noticed that many participants had varied responses regarding finding their motivations. Many participants liked positive reinforcement while others were more affected by negative reinforcement. Lastly, we saw that participants like the idea of having community support and accountability especially when trying to build a new habit.

Takeaways

We want to create an app that will help provide a place for young adults to be able to set healthy sleep habits and routines while having support from friends and family. We have noticed that everyone has a different form of motivation and that there is not a one size fits all solution. We want people to be able to have many options to fit their needs. We also noticed that the participants like having an accountability partner where people are able to share their goals and achievements. This means we will look into having a collaborative and community aspect to our app. Since almost all participants were on their phones right before going to sleep, incorporating a way to help people step away and have a smoother transition into sleep could be considered, too. For waking up, most people needed multiple alarms and consciously snoozed them so we will need to look into how we can incorporate that into our app for people to have better and more consistent wake-up times.