Haven

Haven is a platform allowing you to find solutions to destress and create a good sleep environment from and within your own home. Offering additional features like dream interpretation to help determine their hidden meanings and possibly find an answer within them. Offering less widely accessible solutions like hypnotherapy and day havens, all done from home and your local area. We have a space to connect you to a designer to help redesign your bedroom to an optimal sleep space. All activities, talks and features on the platform are there to ensure a more successful sleep and then a more successful you.

Modern technology and all of the social and work expectations seem to constantly prevent us from sleeping or leave us too stressed to sleep. We end up a mere shell off who we could be should we just sleep a little longer. Not sleeping doesn’t only affect our social ability, ability to concentrate, creativity, it can also compromise our immune system. Wonder why you’re always sick? Not getting enough sleep may be the reason. We often forget to priorities sleep which inevitable leads to a variety of problems and less efficient work. On top of addition stress, blue light, intrusive thoughts etc.. How can we design something easy to use to help people priorities and make sleeping easier.

Haven is a platform designed to consider the different aspects required to create a space physically and mentally for a good sleep. You take a sleep quiz in the onboarding to determine a problem space and preferences to help design the best ‘sleep retreat’ for you. In app you find things like meditations, yoga, breathing, techniques, talks, connect with a sleep hypnosis therapist, activities and information on aroma therapy, designing a sleep friendly space, dream journals and create a sleep retreat for yourself. It considers your location and designs a day of activities that will help you sleep.

This project went through several stages, research, ideation, co-creation, a brain dump, user-testing and feedback, personas, mood board, design changes, journey maps and updates. You name it.

In efforts to help us come up with an idea were were asked to do a mind-map and brain dump, sketch out ideas and build off of it. Then create a 2D, 3D and 4D prototype on your chosen topic. I had a lot of trouble finding a good topic. I ended up half asleep after 3 hours of research in trying to find a way to make the topic of immunity into something and that’s when I came up with sleep.

When it came to the proposal I knew the sleep retreat was the way to go. I had all the research, some prototypes, a concept and a million different things related to sleep, even some tech. The initial idea of a localised retreat while I liked it, it felt wrong. I think the piece of feedback that stuck with me the most and really changed the whole direction of the project and made it become what it is was someone saying ‘some people don’t sleep well outside of their beds no matter how comfortable’. I thought about it a lot. Eventually finally thinking that shifting it online, having retreats be done with amenities in your local area was way more effective.

It made it easier to be more focused on sleeping better at home, things became more directly applicable, more accessible to more people, cheaper, less travel and most importantly allowed people to sleep in their own bed. I think the shift from a physical space to online was the most important shift of the project. After that it consisted of more improvements to make a more usable and personalised space. Trying to make the app sleep friendly too with an automatic red-light filter for the whole phone. Technology is one of the main disrupters and I wanted that to cause the least damage possible.
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The other thing was I was so unhappy with the design and felt stuck until it was said to strip down to white and use very little of one color. Doing that gave me a fresh start. I looked at different wellness apps, changed the font and rounded things off more and was left with a clean, simple and more appropriate design.

I think hearing that and doing that really helped me get out of my own head and the weird loop that I was sitting in. The app also has a lot of images. It doesn’t need a complex background. Sometimes less is more. The shift in the design made me feel a lot better about the app, more calm in the creation. The additional advice like offloading heavy information to a website and making more in-app activities and talks I think also helped it become what it is. In the end I was actually quite proud of the design. Of course there is always room for improvement but given the state of it before this new design and its elements and personalisation is a breath of fresh air. I don’t regret any stage I went through. I think it was all essential. I think I needed the worse idea to get to the good one and the bad design to get to the clean and pretty one. I think all the steps were essential to the project and my learning.