Designing a bedtime app that wants you to put your phone down
Mude · Wind-down app concept
- Role
- UX Researcher / UX Designer
- Period
- 1 month
- My Contributions
- End-to-end concept design · User research · Interaction design
- Platforms
- Mobile app
- Collaborators
- Solo project
- Methods
- Secondary research, survey, journey mapping, guerrilla usability testing, moderated usability testing, iterative prototyping
2
rounds of usability testing overturned a core assumption and reshaped the concept
Discover
Bedtime procrastination isn't just poor scheduling — for a lot of people, staying up late is the last bit of personal time they get in a day. I started with secondary research into the causes and severity of the problem, then ran a survey to check what I was finding against real responses, looking at how procrastination correlated with occupation, sleep habits, and stress levels. Students and women showed up as most affected, but the pattern crossed other groups too. The leading driver wasn't really about sleep at all — it was "reclaiming me-time," usually sitting on top of stress or anxiety, with poor control over device use close behind. People already reached for journaling, reading, meditation, and ambient sound to wind down; the question was whether a product could support that instead of getting in the way of it.
Define
I framed the project around two questions: how might we help people feel more present and less stressed during the day, and how might we build a wind-down experience people would actually keep coming back to. Journaling became the core feature — a way to remind people of the moments they'd had, before turning it into something reassuring to close the day on.
I mapped the flow on FigJam to find real entry points — someone experiencing a moment worth recording, snapping a photo, wanting to look back at something, or just starting to wind down — and the points where people would likely drop off: not knowing what to write, deciding something wasn't worth recording, or the whole thing not feeling worth the effort. That shaped a tighter set of design questions, the one that mattered most being how to make Mude the last digital interaction before sleep, not another thing competing for attention.
Ideate & Prototype
I sketched the key screens — home, journaling, a gallery of past entries, and the wind-down flow itself, closing with a "farewell to today" ritual modeled on tearing a page off a calendar. Lo-fi wireframes went into guerrilla testing with 5 users, which surfaced real problems fast: the home screen's date element was more distracting than useful, button placement needed better accessibility, the wind-down screens were too text-heavy to actually feel relaxing, and the farewell page needed to come after the moment review, not before it.
Test
I built the hi-fi version from that feedback, then ran 3 moderated sessions with follow-up interviews. One question from a participant reshaped the whole product: what happens if I journal about something that annoyed me — wouldn't reading that again right before bed be the opposite of relaxing? That was the real finding. I'd built one feature to hold every kind of entry, assuming reflection was inherently calming. It isn't, if what you're reflecting on is something that upset you. Testing also flagged that the interface felt visually "too rigid," and that a slideshow-style review read as stimulating rather than soothing.
That led to a rebrand and a split: Mood Tracking, to visualize patterns over time, and a separate Emotional Dumpster, for the things people needed to get out but didn't need to see again at bedtime. Only the reflective, positive entries carried into the wind-down review.
Early concept sketch — explored, not part of the final scope
This week
Good night
Outcome
No live users or production data — this was a self-initiated concept. What's real: two rounds of testing that overturned a founding assumption and reshaped the product from a single journaling feature into two distinct ones, based on what actually happened when people used it, not what I'd assumed going in. What's missing: a further round of testing on the rebranded, split version itself. The two-feature split addressed what the second round of testing surfaced, but I never got to validate whether it actually solved the problem for users — that's the natural next step if I picked this project back up.
Takeaway
The best usability test doesn't always validate your design — sometimes it challenges the premise you built the whole thing on. And engagement isn't universally the goal: for a bedtime product, helping someone successfully disengage and put the phone down is the actual win, not keeping them in the app longer.