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Sleepio -- London, UK

We're a digital sleep improvement program, clinically proven to help overcome long term poor sleep.

Hiring: CTO, Product Lead, Bus dev. http://www.sleepio.com/jobs

Drop me a line direct if you want to hear more: peter@sleepio.com (co-founder)

London / SF + + + PocketProf (www.thepocketprof.com) + + + CTO, Product, Business Development

We take the data from your personal tracking apps and devices and turn it into behavioural medicine. Our first product, Sleepio (www.sleepio.com), is a clinically-proven sleep improvement program. Now we need your help to develop our product and business to the next level!

We're hiring a CTO, product, marketing and business development leads. If you get excited by using your skills to transform people's health, then get in touch with us at jobs@thepocketprof.com.

More details on roles at www.thepocketprof.com/jobs/

Hurray for Bytemark! :)

Nice idea. But I'm either being stupid or it's barfing - have completed all fields but getting an 'all fields required' error.

A true legend. RIP.

They did take objective measures, via polysomnography. It's one of the novel aspects of this study. Interesting that perceived difficulty getting to sleep after gaming was greater than that recorded via the polysomnography.

Yes blue light inhibits melatonin release, although to my knowledge there is still very little reliable research on in-situ, naturalistic use of devices on sleep.

Agreed that this is a small sample; however the use of both subjective and objective measures is a step forward.

I agree it is a small sample - although not uncommon for psychology studies.

I'm going to see if Dr Kyle (who wrote the post) can hop on here to give us his view.

Looks great! Lovely idea. What feedback have you got about pricing so far?

Thanks so much! Sounds fascinating - what's your service called? Would love to see how you've approached that challenge - I know for us it took a lot of iterations!

We decided 'Sleepio' way before .io domains were available!

Thanks for all the constructive comments guys.

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!

None - it's all recorded...er, I mean magic.

Nice idea - we would need to connect the headline explaining the programme with the Prof more clearly, but that's pretty easy. Will work it up, thanks!

Thanks, but I actually think we need to be even clearer. It should be obvious what to do without reading anything. And if high-functioning HN users are making that error, your average Boots customer almost certainly is.

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...

We built the main sessions in Flash first because it was the quickest way to discover what it was that we were building! So the Flash version has been around longest and is the most stable (and currently the slickest). Once we were confident of the functional requirements we built the HTML5 version, but that's still in beta so we display the Flash version by default if you have it installed/enabled. Quite a few technical challenges we had to overcome to chain videos seamlessly in HTML5 on iPad...we'll definitely be writing about it once the launch dust has settled...

Thanks neya! Very kind. Although...we have an HTML5 version running concurrently; try it on iPad...

Thanks for taking the time to look at it and give such thorough feedback.

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

Yep peer referral is the most powerful driver - you've echoed the view of pretty much every sleep sufferer I've interviewed!

The Boots partnership was in part to try to build that trust (and therefore value).

You've inadvertantly highlighted a UX failing of ours - that's not actually a sign up form!

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...

Yes, we'll need an umbrella name. But right now it's more important for it to be immediately obvious what the problem is that we can help with, since we rely on self-diagnosis, (the user is actively looking for a sleep solution either online or in Boots store).

Thanks. Can I ask why?

Understood. Fair point.

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?

Interesting. Thanks! That will be my response from now on...

Thanks man! Yes it's a case of picking battles really at first - even within sleep there's so much we can do...

Thanks for the suggestion - it's something we've considered; the issue with our tests to date has been getting the minute-to-minute fidelity with a circular interface (plus it's actually quite hard to drag something accurately in a circular motion). But we should revisit this all with fresh eyes - and the idea much appreciated!

The thing we've wrestled most with (and haven't yet cracked) is how to accept time entry in a way that is unambiguous to even the least confident users, and also encompasses the range of quanta we need to manage (from mins to many hours). We've tried a few different solutions but 24hr dropdowns result in the least comprehension errors!!

How would you do it if you were us?

Hmmm because our primary target (middle aged women) are not that web-savvy i guess, and the .com is the default TLD. We bagged sleep.io when it first went on sale but haven't considered using it as the default.

To ask the opposite (and possibly stupid) question - why would you make sleep.io the default?

Yes that's the vision! That when you have a problem, you just 'visit The Prof', and he gives you a blended programme to help you. Sleep is a good starting point, since it is a) socially acceptable to talk about, and b) is highly co-morbid with other problems - a good way in to health in general.

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... :)

So - we've tried to be strict on limiting our messages, and we've developed these based on iterative testing - with users on the site, but also on the street with strangers (shoving the pack under their noses and asking what they think it is!).

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.