Show HN: Sleepio - how I cured my insomnia, turned into software.
sleepio.com
sleepio.com
On the home page, the “How it works” three-page widget scrolls too slowly when I click one of the three page circles. That speed is fine for the automatic page-turning every 8 seconds, but if I click a circle, I want to see that page right away – the animation should be about 5 times faster. I was slightly annoyed by the slowness when I tried to go back to the first page, which you don’t want.
It also might help to stop that widget from scrolling until the user has scrolled far down enough that you think they have started reading it, so they can read the first step first, and aren’t forced to click on the first-page circle to go there themselves. Perhaps you don’t care which page the user reads first, but the chronological ordering of the pages contradicts that idea.
When I read https://www.sleepio.com/sciencebehindsleepio, I was impressed that you said you had done experimental trials, and I couldn’t see any sign of obvious bias in the experimental design, but I was still a bit skeptical and worried that the experiments were biased. I just realized that an addition that would have convinced me a lot more strongly would have been a LaTeX-formatted scientific paper about the experiment, typeset in Computer Modern. The paper would not promote Sleepio, but just describe the experimental method and results. I don’t know if LaTeX supports exporting to a web page with the Computer Modern font embedded – if not, you’d have to link to a PDF, which you’d have to work hard to convince me to open.
The name thing is the one thing that always seems to delight people; it's indicative of the care/attention we pay (hopefully) to the user throughout the programme. To arrive at names we started with census records of top baby names going back 50 years, and now periodically add to them with names people enter that we don't have. It degrades gracefully though if we don't know your name!
Noted re: speed of transition. We're adding paddles today too. We decided to keep all animations in synch, but that's a good call on waiting til viewed. We'll look at it.
If we can get permission from the journal we supplying the original paper would be a great idea, although a more accessible format might be better. You can read abstract on pubmed here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22654196
How would you do it if you were us?
I no more have a time I go to bed every night than I have a US zip code or a ten-digit cell phone number.
We've taken what are the clinical standard measures - and some indeed feature counterintuitive questions. And you're right, one of the main issues with 'insomnia' is an unreliable sleep pattern.
We don't want to know how you slept last night, since this may be unrepresentative; but as you say an 'average' may also not capture it/be a natural way to report it. 3 x sample points ('last 3 nights') may be longwinded. Will consider...any ideas on a better question?
It is hugely inspiring to see that you've just nailed this sort of seamless and beautiful experience. I'm going to sign up for a course just so I can see how you've handled the various design challenges inherent to such a service. We've got our own exciting plans, but I'd love to learn from your example.
Also, I've got one nagging question I'd love your answer to. We've got a bunch of artists in-house, but don't have much in the way of great tools for animation. What tools did you use to do the animations on the Prof and the backgrounds? (Love the moustache mountain!) I'd be surprised if that was done with Flash keyframes, as I find them to be painfully slow to work with.
Thanks for releasing this here on HN. I hope you have a great launch. I'll be sharing your service with my team, and my friends, many of whom are frustrated night owls looking for better morning time.
A limitation of our current media-rich approach however is the cost of adapting content - we took a short term cheap, long term expensive approach... :)
Regardless, I like the site, though it sometimes gets a bit choppy on my old macbook pro. I think £50 might be a bit steep as an up-front cost - it almost put me off.
Also, have you considered doing an iphone app for the diary? I use some supposedly motion sensing app to wake me up with music. It doesn't work very well, but for your purposes I could easily see just thumping the phone when I notice I'm awake instead of having to look at a clock and remember a time.
Especially since it's the start of the academic year I can imagine this going down well with my student friends - maybe some kind of discount would make it more enticing.
Either way, this looks awesome and clearly the result of a lot of hard work. The Boots partnership makes it all the more exciting. Congratulations guys :)
The Boots thing is very interesting. Are you willing to share how that came about? I'll need to nip in today and have a wee look.
£25? More than I was expecting!
For those of you who would like to try Sleepio, we've set up a discount code for the first 100 to use it: HN-STOLE-MY-SLEEP will give you 30% off.
Thanks for all the feedback, and look forward to any more you've got!
To ask the opposite (and possibly stupid) question - why would you make sleep.io the default?
In this case I'm not sure why they went with 'sleepio' if they weren't going to use '.io' other than perhaps it's trendy right now, but I think they probably made the right move getting the .com.
Sounds interesting, but £49.99 is way too much for me right now.
We're going to try a lower price point ongoing subs model to avoid that initial barrier; the assumption initially was that we need to front-load the value, since we're curing people!!
The Boots partnership was in part to try to build that trust (and therefore value).
So it's always been a candidate, but other messages seemed more important, largely because it seems that most people think poor sleep -> sleeping pills, and do not think -> CBT / therapy. As in, it's the immediate frame of reference. That's been confirmed in training/talking to Boots staff, but they have found that reference point useful in making the value case to customers.
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It's a tricky question - there's no solid data on the awareness of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy but it lends credibility to those who do know it. In our (quick and dirty) research it seems that a majority of our main initial target (middle aged women) have heard about it but don't know what it is...
(just in the interest of full disclosure, I'm the lead developer for Sleepio)
We ask for your first name so you can meet The Prof; another thing we're wrestling with, how to introduce that (non-standard) experience in a clear way...
Unfortunately there isn't an obvious affordance for this sort of interaction (that I've yet come across) - it looks like an email signup, when in fact it's more like 'play a game'...an interesting challenge...
It would be interesting to see if a vague 'what's your name' approach, rather than a specific direction with a stated outcome, wins in a split-test.
If I want to try it, I will put my email for free. And then you can sell me anything by email, in a future.