Calm Sleep Vision
Date: 2023
Role, duration: Design Lead, 2.5 months
Objective: Produce a sleep-focused product vision deliverable, with mockups and looking 1–2 years out, that is aligned on by Product, Design, and Engineering leadership by the end of the quarter
Context:
Sleep is Calm’s largest use case, has high efficacy, but has low awareness for new users
Half are aware of soundscapes but less than 10% are aware of Sleep Stories
Less than 25% listen to Sleep Stories (compared to almost 50% for meditations)
Sleep Tracking apps are growing at a faster rate than Sleep-inducing apps
User needs are more diverse than what Calm currently offers
Project type: Product strategy, user research, user journey development, feature development
Existing sleep experience.
Approach
Starting with the user, I collaborated with our lead UX Researcher to understand, distill, and prioritize core user problems per phase of testers’ combined average sleep journey. From there, I then took a step back: If I was a Calm user who selected my goal was “better sleep,” how do I actually get better sleep? This led me down a path of grounding the work in sleep hygiene research, codifying the average sleep user experience into a sleep user journey (aligned to behavior change principles), establishing core pillars of sleep for the Calm product, and defining how a dedicated Sleep tab with distinct sleep features would fit into Calm's broader information architecture and overall product offering.
Translating the sleep user journey into a core engagement loop, and behavior change framework.
Many wireframes and design reviews later, the fun part started: Translating all of my thinking and strategy into a high-fidelity vision narrative.
The vision
Calm is the go-to solution for better sleep hygiene.
The mission
Through personalized wind down routines, simple and effective sleep experiences, and morning motivation, we help you ease the racing mind in order to fall asleep quickly, wake up refreshed, and build long-term healthy sleep habits.
Sleep vision narrative
Their journey starts during dinner. They see an ad on social media about Calm’s new sleep experience, which claims to help people build healthy sleep habits like, a consistent sleep schedule, nightly wind down routine, and daytime stress management. Intrigued, they download the Calm app to help get ready for bed tonight.
During onboarding, Calm asks them about their sleep goals and prompts them to connect to HealthKit to better understand how they sleep and personalize their sleep experience.
After onboarding, they enter Calm and see tonight’s wind down on Home. They see that it consists of a music playlist, sleep story, and soundscape. They also see their target bedtime based on their health data, and that Calm will remind them to start winding down 45 minutes beforehand.
Curious to learn more about what Calm has to offer, they see the Sleep tab on the bottom. They tap it and see tonight’s wind down with the option to customize. They scroll and also sees the ability to quickly add items to their wind down, learn tips for improving their sleep environment, and browse sleep-specific content. “This is pretty cool,” they think to themselves. They finish dinner and head to the couch to wrap up some work items.
At 11:00, they receive a push notification that it’s time to start winding down. They open Calm, and start their wind down from Home. They see a walk through for what to expect, including some tips to Airplay their experience.
They do so and wrap up a few work emails with calm, ambient music playing in the background.
When they get in bed, they open Calm and see sleep focus mode with a widget to start their Sleep Story. They tap next to play Nordland Night Train by Erik Braa. Within 20 minutes, they fall asleep. To help them stay asleep throughout the night, Calm automatically plays their chosen soundscape of White Noise Ocean Surf.
The next morning, they wake up and instantly checks their social media. 2 minutes after doing so, they receive a push notification from Calm asking them how they slept? Remembering their motivation to improve sleep, they tap the notification to check-in.
They reflect on their sleep quality, and is met with a celebration for their first night with Calm.
They see how their wind down helped them fall asleep in 9 minutes, so they rate it to inform their personalized wind down for tonight. Delighted, they finish and see some morning recommendations to start their day.
During the day, Calm sends them a push notification with a Sleep insight: "Getting at least 30m of natural light exposure helps you sleep better. Take a walk with the Daily Jay." Stressed from being in meetings all morning, they take a break and go on an afternoon walk to grab lunch.
Knowing that they played the mindful walking recommendation, and seeing that they got their steps in via HealthKit, Calm celebrates them finding some Calm in their day and making progress to get a better night’s sleep. Calm also lets them know that their wind down is ready to preview.
Intrigued, they open Calm and preview their wind down for tonight. They notice a meditation that they want to swap, and do so using the customizer. They replace the meditation with the relaxing ambient playlist from last night, and save their wind down. They then head back to meetings and emails to round out their workday.
At 11:00, just like last night, they get a push notification from Calm to start winding down.
Process highlights
I created different proof of concept wireframes to push/pull the visual direction of what a sleep-focused tab could look like, and trigger conversations about how it might function.
I crafted data visualizations to illustrate how Calm could help users understand sleep progress and patterns over time, and showcase common sleep data points through the HealthKit integration.
I intentionally used the moon to convey last night’s sleep quality in a delightful way while still feeling “on brand” for Calm. This also included thinking about the scroll state for the moon since tapping it was an entry point into viewing sleep progress at a day, week, or month view.
Using my product thinking skills, I closely collaborated with my PM to define a phased approach for achieving the sleep vision and scaling the new feature set.
Reflections
Crafting this vision narrative, and concepting the sub-features that make it up, was all done in just over two months. As the design lead and sole designer focused on this project, there are a few things I would do differently if I could go back in time:
Work with the VP of Product Design to delegate some visual iterations for feature concepts to other designers and/or Calm Studios (the internal content creative team)
Spend more time strategizing and thinking through the free sleep user experience, hardware/smart home integrations, and the visual language of the sleep check-in
Validate core feature concepts with users through usability testing
Fast-forward to today
What was once a future vision is now alive and helping users get better sleep through the Calm Sleep app. See the announcement.
