sheep

Role

Product designer

Project type

Product, UX/UI

Timeline

2025.9 — 2025.12

Tools

Figma, After Effects, Jitter

Wireframes

13

Primary user flow

1

Developed

A smart window system

Modern insomnia

The average American screen time before sleep is around 70 minutes, and this is one of the major reasons people suffer from insomnia nowadays.

Screen lights make the brain think it's daytime, so it won't fall asleep even though it's dark outside, and the mood is affected by social media — leading to information overload.

What keeps us from sleep

Us before sleep. I wanted to know more about this problem, so I conducted 4 interviews to learn more about people's bedtime routines.

I extracted keywords from the interviews and noticed that many people feel emotionally active before sleep. But surprisingly, words related to the physical environment show up many times — which proves that it also plays a crucial role before sleep.

The larger picture

To understand the core problem in a larger sense, I mapped the primary user journey and realized that after a long day of work, school, or anything that drains our energy, our minds carry lingering emotions into bedtime — while the physical environment gets completely ignored. Screen time amplifies this further, flooding the mind with new information right when it needs to wind down.

These two things together keep the body from feeling ready to sleep. This is what sheep's grounding ritual is designed to address.

Core experience

With all the analyses from my research and interview, I realized that most sleeping apps go straight to mental, but never pay attention to anything in the physical environment. The core flow of sheep is structured around two pain points in order — physical environment first, mental clutter second — because the body needs to feel settled before the mind can let go.

User journey

User flow

Window system

Because it is not enough to only use an app to guide users to sleep, sheep incorporates smart films and developed a window system that allows users to adjust the whole physical environment.

Smart films are electrically activated, self-adhesive sheets applied to existing glass to turn it from transparent to opaque instantly. In the future, smart films can certainly be incorporated with other smart home devices (like AC, speaker, humidifier, etc.) to adjust the environment together.

Activate grounding ritual

sheep first grounds the users by providing a sensory experience. The window system incorporates many home devices to adjust the physical environment.

The demo video shows that when the user approaches the window (smart film), the system activates, and the user can start the grounding ritual to receive a sensory experience that helps them focus on the physical environment instead of cluttered thoughts.

Adjust the environment

After the grounding ritual, the user now notices more details of the environment, and they can adjust the parameters via the mobile app. Users can adjust the environment parameters like temperature, humidity, light level, and noise level.

They can also choose to play a background music playlist as an element.

Store the emotions

After the physical layer is adjusted and settled, sheep guides users to store their emotions through journaling, voicing, or simply set a focus timer to quiet the mind.

The demo video shows the system interacting with these 3 features.

Sleep mode

What I learned

Through this project, I learned that solving for sleep means designing for a transition — not that sequencing matters. Physical comfort has to come before mental release, not the other way around.

I also learned how constraint is generative. Two pain points form four interviews kept every decision purposeful, and helped me resist feature creep.

Working across a physical system and a mobile app also showed me that the handoff between them — the moment the window activates and the phone responds — is where the whole experience either closes or falls apart.