Merck
Best Mobile App – DTC National Advertising Awards.
Ayogo Health Inc. is a video game company which motivates people to change their lives, one fun social game at a time. Studies says that is good to have relaxing tones to set a mood before bed, like light shades of green, blue, lavender, peach, pink or neutral tones for peaceful energy. App design rationale was conceived to take the user to a calm place in which they will find a series of cues to help them improve their sleep hygiene.
General Goals
- Create an app that full-filled the medical requirements from Merck to support their marketing strategy.
- Create an engaging experience that would bring users back to the app by providing rewards and scheduled tasks to support users with sleep disorders.
Research
In the research we found out many factors that can influence the way you sleep. Some of these studies say that is good to have relaxing tones to set a mood before bed, like light shades of green, blue, lavender, peach, pink or neutral tones for peaceful energy. Some others studies indicate that actually yellow candle tones are the best options. Research also showed how users behave with instructional apps, and also how important it would be to have some sort of a coach inside of the app to guide and support these patients in the app.
Concept
App design rationale was conceived to take the user to a calm place in which they will find a series of cues to help them improve their sleep. The idea was to have a coach in the app to support users in this process to improve their sleep. Merck didn’t want to make this application ‘too’ medical, therefore we had to find a way to create a concept that connected with the users in a more emotional level. We had to create an experience which could separate users from theirs worries during the day. We had to create an immersive experience for them.
Design
During the design process we had a lot of iterations to come up with the proper ‘fantasy’ for this medical application. We had to provide nice soothing colours, and somehow sing lullabies to these users.
We introduced our coach Lou, a turtle which will take you on a journey to different destinations to get relaxed in front of beautiful scenery and sounds. The coach was designed by: Cicero Villas-Boas who managed to create very vivid expressions in the coach face to generate empathy in the users. We used quite sometime to come up with the right expressions and it was totally worth.
User Interface
This is the ‘place’ in which we combined all the components from the team, from our wishlist and research findings. I brought warm tones in the interface, aiming to generate a proper colour temperature prior to sleep. Designed with special attention an interface that was comfortable to use, legible, and most importantly, that generated empathy in the users.
The interface was designed to support the rationale of the app, with the intention of immersing users more into the fantasy of the digital therapeutic. I created a custom wooden background inspired in a ukelele, which relates with the coach character, combined with the story of the app which also connects with the imagery and sounds collections in the library.
Best Mobile App
DTC National Advertising Awards
2016 DTCN Ad Awards Winners >>
Ayogo’s post for the award
30 relaxation soundtracks with imagery designed to provide the right stimulus to improve sleeping routine.
Audio Design
I worked on the audio design of this project. I created the app sounds, plus the soundscape collections, in which we provided a variety of audio sounds approaches to relax the users, like pink noise, wind, rain, among many others. These sounds were delivered progressively as a reward system to the users as they unlock the different levels in the app.
For these soundscapes we had the challenge that the app had a limit size of 50mb, and we had the idea of providing a big library of this soundscapes, which had to be long enough for a person to fall asleep. To tackle this, I created soundscapes using 3 or 4short loops per soundscape, then these loops were mixed using code created by the lead developer. This technical spec allowed us to store 30 relaxation soundtracks.
As the coach, Lou is a Hawaiian turtle, I used a ukulele to record sounds to provide feedback as users completed their tasks in the app. This sounds happened every-time they swiped-right their challenges in the task page.
Results
The app was released in the United States in Google App and Apple App Store. Merck won an award for Best Mobile App in 2016 DTC National Advertising Awards. This award happened after a couple of years of the release, It was a very proud moment for the team and the entire company.
Best Mobile App – DTC National Advertising Awards- 2016 – Bronze
Sleep Guru Merck & Co, Inc.
Boston, United States – 2016
Check Sleep Guru audio in Soundcloud
Game sounds
