Targeted Users

People who reflect before going to sleep

Stakeholders for our research mainly comprise of adults who engage in unconscious/conscious night reflection and aim to enhance mood or self control. One specific user group that might benefit include college students who have stress from academics and turn to night reflection to evaluate their mental well-being and consider actions for self-improvement. Based on this primary finding, more examples of potential stakeholders include the following:

• Adults who struggle with anxiety feelings about scheduling work meetings and planning for the job progress.

• Adults who engage in inefficient pre-sleep reflection which reduce the sleeping quality.

• Students who struggle with their academic performance and social connection. 

• Parents that struggle with housework and child-care.

(Pre-User Research)

People of all ages in modern society have their own pressure, people have social anxiety, emotional breakdown, pressure from work and study, insomnia, and so on.

This user research was conducted through this worldwide challenge to study people's night time reflection behavior, quality, and pain points when they stay at night and aiming to do reflection to enhance their mood and performance. Here are the main questions that we are exploring, although they are not the exact questions asked during the user research sessions:

1. How are people currently engaging in night reflection?

2. How do people consider the importance of nighttime reflection?

3. What methods or tools are people currently using when reflecting at night?

4. How are one's surroundings conducive to reflection?

5. What emotions do people experience when reflecting at night?

6. What challenges do people encounter when reflecting at night?

7. How is the reflection process different for people before they sleep versus during the day?

Questions 1-2 explore current practices that participants employ when reflecting and their attitudes towards reflection. Questions 3-4 investigate interactions with technology and the environment during night reflection. Questions 5-6 investigate the emotional experience of night reflection, and question 7 compares daytime to night-time reflection.

User Research

Semi-Structure Interview

We are looking for quality over quantity for this project. User interview allows us to deeply understand potential user’s situation with our guiding questions and easy to follow up to extend the inputs further. Since the project is designed for college freshmen and most of them only spent one quarter/semester in college. Therefore, we decided to choose 5 students with very diverse background to do the deep analysis to avoid potential large repetition in the response and larger data processing stage to fit into the high-paced design process.

This is one of my primary responsibility. I have came up most of the interview questions to fulfill the user research goals, with minor changes by the teammates. I have also conduced several user interviews after providing guidelines and key summary of the questions.

Survey

The survey method contains 9 questions regarding the demographics and the general experiences to night time reflections; the survey is designed to be finished within approximately 5 minutes. This method is ideal because it primarily explores the emotion changes and the length of reflection from a shallow but quick process. Also, since the survey is open to the general public and will receive numerous inputs, it is summative to our database and easier to analyze the schemes about night time reflections experiences and the design requirements later. In comparison to the semi-structured interview, another method we have used in our research process, the survey is to concentrate on a larger amount of inputs rather than in-depth understanding of the reflection process.

(Click Image to Enlarge)

User Research Takeaway

(My Responsibilities)

Use of Technology Before Bed

Participants held varying viewpoints toward the use of technology when reflecting in bed. Some avoided the use of mobile phones entirely, whereas others used phones to document thoughts as well as to provide structure to their reflection. Some people used diaries or journals when reflecting in bed. Technology devices also functioned as a method for distraction for one participant as they used their phone in bed to watch Youtube videos in order to avoid rumination before falling asleep.

Attitudes Toward Reflection

Perspectives on reflection varied as well. The majority of participants reflected on negative experiences and felt that reflection distracted their efforts to sleep. Some participants sought to avoid reflection in order to not engage in negative thoughts, while others valued reflecting on negative experiences as an important process for self-improvement. Overall, nighttime reflections were less positively received than daytime reflections, but most participants saw value in the experience, even if unpleasant. People felt frustrated when they failed to act upon their reflection takeaways.

Long Reflection Hinders Effort to Sleep

Spending a long time reflecting before falling asleep reduced participants’ quality of sleep. When they fell asleep quickly, participants mentioned feeling happier and more relaxed. Reflecting at night seemed to make it harder to fall asleep quickly. Time spent reflecting varied between under 15 minutes to up to 2 hours, with most participants reflecting between 15 and 30 minutes.

Triggers of Night-time Reflection

Reflection seems to have many different triggers, most notably time. If the individual is tired, they won’t reflect as they will fall asleep quickly. The environment when preparing to sleep, with lights turned off, silence, and isolation, also triggers reflective behavior as people “don’t have anything else to do,” as Kyle stated. Failures can also trigger reflection: academic-related failures and feelings of dread for assignments or tests were common themes in reflection. 

Design Requirements

Allow Users to Reflect without Digital Technology

Many participants felt that the use of technology before bed reduces their quality of sleep, yet some relied on their mobile phones to record thoughts from reflection. Therefore, our design should allow for non-digital interaction to avoid distracting from efforts to sleep.

Support Users in Taking Action on their Reflection Takeaways 

Many participants felt disappointed when they failed to take action following a reflection. Inaction stemmed from either forgetting about the reflection takeaway or anxiety about making big changes to their lifestyle.

Consider the Negative Emotions Associated with Night Reflection

Compared to daytime reflections, reflections at night tend to be about negative experiences, at times forcing people to stay awake longer than desired. Our design should consider the potentially heavy material of reflection and its impact on mental health and seek to form a more positive relationship with reflection.

Adapt to Varying Frequency of Engaging in Reflection

Survey responses revealed that the frequency of reflecting at night varied greatly from those who seldom reflect to others who reflect daily. Our design should adapt to these variances and support night reflection for both frequent and occasional users.

Refined Design Question

Since I have composed the user research takeaway report, I have communicated with my teammates about the further steps in making the real deliverable. Then, we have came up the refined design questions.

Understanding that participants felt frustrated by their inaction following a night-time reflection, we refined the design question as follows: How can we design a non-digital system to support people working towards self-improvement in remembering and acting upon reflection takeaways? We narrowed our target population to people who reflect in order to find room for self-improvement, such as habitual changes. As some participants rejected the use of digital technology while trying to sleep, we constrain design solutions to non-digital approaches.

Refined Stakeholders

Extending from the refined design questions, we have also reimagined the target stakeholders.

The survey results reveal that those who engage in night-time reflection can vary greatly in age (respondents were between 12 and 60 years old). As such, targeting a specific age group makes little sense. Of the respondents, 64.6% engage in night reflection at least 3 times a week, suggesting that most people do not need “nudges” for reflection, and would benefit more from tools that augment their reflection. 65.1% of survey respondents feel as though reflection does not help their efforts to sleep, suggesting an area of exploration of whether efforts to support night reflection can have detrimental effects to the user’s health.

Finally, we have decided to create a physical coloring book which is easy to manufacture and will have a lower price on the market:

Peer Critique

After populating the ideation to our design classmates and teaching team members, we have organized several 5 minutes casual critique sessions, in groups, to understand the design direction. We asked for feedback from other designers on how effectively this concept supports night-time reflection. Some suggestions that we received to refine this design included:

1. Having 365 pages makes it feel like an obligatory task, rather than a relaxation exercise

2. Consideration for people who would rather engage in freehand drawing

3. Motivation to use diary could wane after seeing the same reflection prompts each time

4. Too many interactions can be demotivating

Low-Fidelity Prototype

Based on the feedback and suggestions that we received, we refined our prototype with the following changes:

1. Have users decide reflection prompts themselves by choosing stickers from the back of the diary (see image below)

2. Step away from having 365 pages for the diary

3. Simplify interactions by allowing users to fill in the bubble corresponding to their emotional response, while also maintaining the flexibility of responding in length

With these changes, the brief low-fidelity prototype was produced.

Extending from the initial ideation, in this version of the prototype, the user responds to each reflection prompt by filling in the circle representing their emotion. Then, they revisit each question and reuse the colors to complete the drawing, as shown in the image above.

Usability Testing

(My Responsibility)

With this refined design, we conducted user tests with potential users to test its desirability and usability. We intended the user tests to be explorative, so we rejected the use of an interview protocol to form a conversational environment.

I have created the usability testing procedures and conducted the entire usability testing with qualitative note taking. Afterwards, I have composed an executive summary of the result to refine future prototypes and designs.

Some key feedback from our two user tests include:

1. Participants thought that engaging with the diary can be time-consuming and could be difficult to stay awake

2. Participants anticipate that motivation for use will wane after awhile due to the repetition of prompts

3. Coloring helps them relax and calm down after a busy day

Overall, the participants found the interaction to be a generally positive, engaging experience with minor areas for improvement.

Publication

Koyo Nakamura, one of my teammate who initially came up with the idea of supporting night time reflection, continued on with the research based on the project outcomes, after our project was completed. His research paper was later on published on the ACM, Association for Computing Machinery during the SIGDOC’21 Annual Student Research Conference.

I was also listed as the co-author of the article as I have primarily contributed in the initial user research summary by conducting interviews and distribute surveys, and the entire usability testing stage with methods such as Wizard of Oz.