Birdy App
Unwind before sleep with gentle stretches, guided by a virtual bird that lives on your smartwatch—rest your eyes, body, and mind.
⏱️ Duration 1-week embodied design sprint
📏Project type Individual school project
01 Discover
Background
Many people suffer from insomnia, research has shown that having bad sleeping habits is one of the main causes.
Interviews
After talking to people who have had experienced insomnia more than once, I asked about their sleeping habits, how it is like when suffering from bad sleep, and gathered their opinions.
Summary of the interviews
Pain point
Many habits concern long time with mobile phone/long time with computers.
Many have good habit but some reflect it is hard to stick to it.
Bad sleep is connected with negative emotions.
Problem
Bad sleeping habits are related to insomnia, but people find it hard to get rid of those habits.
02 Define
How to solve the problem?
Following the embodied design method "DISRUPT – DESTABILISE – EMERGE – EMBODY", the bad old habits can be disrupted and gradually replaced by good new habits. Namely, there should be a behavior change.
03 Develop
The idea 💡
The old ritual (a long time use of mobile phones before sleep) is disrupted with a new ritual (stretching) before sleep.
![[1][2]Bad sleeping habits; [3]Having insomnia with a tiff and tense body; [4]Put away the phone/computer and do a nice stretch instead; [5] Sweet dream.](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60705a6a46a53c2a9f25151e/1620734325417-A680JTTDEWD60COLU6AU/storyboard.png)
[1][2]Bad sleeping habits; [3]Having insomnia with a tiff and tense body; [4]Put away the phone/computer and do a nice stretch instead; [5] Sweet dream.
Why stretching?
Stretching as a simple ritual is always connected with positive feelings and has proven to be good to improve sleeping quality.
Why smartwatch app?
Instructions/ feedback are needed during the process.
It can monitor the relevant body data.
Limited screen size and functions liberate people from high engagement with phone and PC screens.s.
Ritual analysis
I prepared a 5-min pre-sleep stretch and asked five people to do it for a week. The five participants are also asked to :
write a short diary about their feelings
rate (from-5 to 5)how do they feel about their sleep last night every day.
Participants
The five participants are all people who use mobile phones/computers more than 30mins right before sleep. And they don't have a habit of daily stretch before.
UX curve (feelings)
👆 The stretch program that the participants were asked to do every day before sleep.
Learnings
Most give positive comments. Some reflect that they feel more comfortable and calm.
Stable ratings, however, no obvious trends or very high values.
Some said they already stretched in the daytime (eg. in the gym).
need customized programs to target some specific body parts.
Most are having a “rise and then fall” trend.
“The law of habituation” (Fridja, 1988)
"Fogg's behavior model"
Refinement
💡An avatar bird as a prompt
According to Fogg's behavior model, our target behavior (stretching every day) will need high motivation as well as high ability. So to keep the "action line" from going down, an avatar bird can be prompt, which nudges people to stick to the stretching habit.
The design concept
A smartwatch experience designed to guide pre-sleep stretching through immersive 3D audio.
As users close their eyes and wear a headset, they hear the sound of a bird in a spatial audio environment. Stretching becomes intuitive—users reach toward the bird’s sound, encouraging gentle movement and body awareness.
The bird evolves and grows over time, reflecting the user’s consistency and progress with the stretch program, offering a calming, rewarding ritual before sleep.
How people percept the position when hearing a stereo sound source.
Survey
To get people's opinions on stretching their body before sleep.
Prototype
Rough interface sketch
Unity stereo sound demo.
Different body modes
Full body
Upper body
Lower body
Custom→ choose from arm/leg/waist/back & neck
Different BGM choices
(other than the bird voice)
White noise: beach, forest, valley, grassland
Pure music
↑ The keywords I extracted from their love & breakup letters.
Learnings
Birds as a signifier here are liked by people.
People appreciate that they can sit on the bed to do the stretch while staying away from their phones.
People like it that there won't be any human voice instruction.
But the perception varies from people. Some feel peaceful and calm, some reflect feelings of nervousness. → to improve this, I will need to work on usability tests with different background music.
