CS 247B Sleep Habits: Intervention Study

After completing the Personas and Journey Maps, we started thinking about potential interventions. We used the observations from the journey maps, and coupled that with insights from a system mapping exercise, in order to identify promising interventions. Then, we started conducting an intervention study with 11 participants. Here are some more details on our process and (preliminary) results!

Picking an intervention

During our baseline study and interviews, we observed that our participants, which were mostly college students, often struggled with going to sleep on time. For many, the school and social anxiety would cause them to pile on activities, tasks, and distractions late into the night, at the cost of poor sleep. This creates a negative feedback loop, which we highlighted in the system mapping exercise.

There were also some positive feedback loops that we uncovered, such as the relationship between sleep education, or being aware of one’s sleep habits and quality, having a nighttime routine, and experiencing high-quality sleep. We decided to focus on this positive feedback loop, which we hypothesized can actually displace the negative feedback loop of nighttime chaos, for our intervention study.

The intervention study

Our study consisted of two main interventions, both with the goal of establishing a nighttime routine.

1. Setting reminders on your phone to tell you to make/eat dinner, start wrapping up your work, and go to bed. The goal was to use these context prompts to remind participants about their goal of forming a routine, and to disrupt the cycle of procrastination and overwork that usually happens during these times.
2. Picking a wind-down activity to conduct every night. This can include things like reading, playing a game, listening to music, or anything that relaxes your mind. We also had participants anchor this activity to something that is already a part of their nightly routine, such as brushing their teeth. By using an action prompt and anchoring, we hoped that participants would be more likely to adopt the wind-down activity as a habit.

Results

Some of our participants weren’t a part of our original baseline study, and so their results for the intervention study are delayed. Nonetheless, we are already starting to notice some patterns in the results.

• Participants noted in their diaries that the context reminders were useful in “forcing” them to not work on schoolwork up until they get into bed.
• Some participants, who had better sleep routines during the baseline, did not find the reminders particularly helpful. Instead, their comments focused more on the winddown activity.
• Some participants chose winddown activities that augmented their feelings and varied day-to-day, like listening to music. They tended to have more irregular sleep quality than those who chose to do the same activity every night, like playing a particular game.