Designing a reliable experience for people to fall asleep, stay asleep and wake up feeling refreshed.
Role
Product Design
Responsibilities
Product Design
Systems Thinking
Vision Alignment
Sleepbuds are a set of tiny earbuds designed to help people address common problems associated with sleeping such as a snoring partner, loud noises in the city or having a racing mind. The way Sleepbuds worked was instead of canceling noise, they would mask the noise by playing a soundtrack over it.
Bose Sleepbuds II was a successor to the original Sleepbuds that launched in Oct 2020. The new generation of Sleepbuds builds upon the foundation that made the original Sleepbuds great while also addressing the common pain points of the customers.
The Challenge
How do we allow people to manage and explore sounds in the Sound Library so that they have a clear understanding of where to find things?
How do we address the challenge of system updates given the technical constraints so that people can keep their buds up to date?
Outcome
The new Sleepbuds received widespread accolades for solving both the hardware and software challenges that led to a vastly improved user experience from the previous generation of Sleepbuds.
Further, in a Bose sponsored clinical study, Sleepbuds were shown to help 8 out of 10 users to improve their overall quality of Sleep.
My Role
I was the digital designer and worked closely with Marketing, Research and Engineers across app and firmware teams to understand and help address the common user pain points. I lead the design work for multiple features through releases across iOS and Android apps.
Context
Back in 2019, when the first generation of Sleepbuds launched, there was a lot of excitement around what the product could do. Bose developed a loyal fanbase of the product but it came with it's own challenges when Bose had to recall the Sleepbuds due to battery issues.
Across the board, you could hear people loud and clear that people loved the product and wished that Bose would take another stab at fixing the issues.
The System Design and Electrical Engineering took a front driving seat for the initial exploration and there was an expedited timeline set for the launch of the next generation of Sleepbuds once there was confidence that using a reliable and tested battery technology could help mitigate a lot of the issues.
Having an aggressive deadline set for the product launch, we decided to focus on key issues that impacted the core user experience and got in the way of going to sleep.
Revamping System Update Flow
System updates on the previous generation of Sleepbuds had 2 major issues -
- As soon as you tapped on the Update pill, your product would automatically enter into transferring the downloaded firmware package to the case. There was no choice to opt out other than force quit the app. And a user had to wait 10 minutes for their buds to finish updating before they could use them again.
- On the next step, the design put the burden on the user to read and understand text and perform certain steps in order in order to finish the update.
These steps got in the way of a person trying to go to sleep. Reading steps and performing updates should have been made optional. So, we started to wrangle this problem and understand the constraints.
The first remedy to fix this was to allow users to make the choice to update their buds. This ensures that the updates don't get in the way of someone trying to go to bed.
Next up, understanding how the FW update worked. Previously, people had to read all the text on 1 screen and expected to do them in order correctly.
Since there was little room to completely revamp the update flow and we had to use the case as an intermediary to transfer the new firmware to the buds, we came up with a step based approach for this scenario. This keeps the user informed of what’s happening and what they need to do next. Instead of dumping everything on 1 screen, this approach makes it easy to digest.
Easier access to sounds
The Sleepbuds use Bluetooth low energy to play sounds stored on the buds. Since they have no streaming, it requires users to manage sounds on their buds. And swap them out from a growing library of sounds.
On the earlier generation of Sleepbuds, going to and exploring the Sound Library took way too many steps. Further, the issue was compounded by the amount of time it took to transfer new sounds. This is how the Sound Library Access has evolved over the years.
We mapped out a way to quickly get to your new sounds within the time constraints we were under.
Considering how a user access the sounds in their library, we decided to make it easy to switch between sounds on your buds and sounds in the library.
This ensured people had a clear expectation of where to go to find new sounds or play sounds on their buds.
One of the consequence of the above solution was that it still took 2 taps to get to the Sound Library as well as know that there are more sounds available for your Sleepbuds than the ones on your buds.
Our next iteration focused on bringing up the access to user's sounds and the sound library up a level. There was clear user feedback that people wanted an even wider variety of sounds for their needs and that the content be more visible up front. I suggested we clear the bottom space to have clear distinction between managing a product, seeing and playing the sounds on the earbuds and allowing access to the sound library.
We worked through the details to understand how it would impact the overall experience. And we pushed through the details to ship the new design to customers.
Takeaways
- Understanding the history of previous explorations and why certain design options weren't pursued saved me a lot of time when it came to picking areas to improve.
- Likewise, talking to engineers about the current state of the overall system and how information flows when it comes to limitations and constraints of BLE helped me gain a solid understanding of what goes on behind the scenes.
- Change can sometimes feel unnerving and having open conversations with everyone on the team and forming a strong conviction for the change proved to be a valuable lesson.
⚠ Disclaimer - All the views presented here represent my own viewpoint and not necessarily of Bose.
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