Wake uP is a project by a Lagos-based organization focused on helping communities with innovative changes for their health and lifestyle. The community needs a solution to assist people with hypersomnia or those who sleep in motion by alerting them before reaching their destination. This affects their work life significantly as they have to deal with missing their stops and getting late to their destination.

1 out of 3 are highly susceptible to sleeping while in motion and have experienced waking up at the wrong bus stops in Nigeria. The strategy team at Wakey Tech has most of these people have a mobile phone and use this to create a solution to ensure they don’t miss their stops.

Design an app that will help people with difficulty staying awake in vehicles to plan their journey and alert them at their stop to help mitigate missing their stops.

UX designer leading the app and responsive website design from conception to delivery

Conducting interviews

Paper and digital wireframing

Low and high-fidelity prototyping

Conducting usability studies

Accounting for accessibility

Iterating on designs

Determining information architecture

Responsive design

I used Wakey’s data on people who sleep on transit to develop interview questions which were then used to conduct user interviews.

Most interview participants felt really helpless about missing their stops and have also tried alternative ways to help themselves. The feedback received through research made it very clear that finding a solution to this will greatly improve the lives of people living in the community.

Easy navigation was a key user need to address in the designs, in addition to keeping the user informed on their next trip.

As the design phase continued, I made sure to base screen designs on feedback and findings from the user research and audits from other trip planners.

Add Trip: Users wanted the ability to add multiple stops before reaching their destination. Even after iterating on the “Add Stop” feature, many still found it unintuitive and challenging to use, especially when trying to add more than one stop.

Save route: Users expressed a need to save frequently used routes for easy access. This feature was essential in helping them plan recurring trips more efficiently.

Finding: Users had difficulty starting an already created trip. Further insights revealed that plans often change in real-life scenarios, so they wanted an easier way to start their next trip conveniently.

Adaptability: Building on earlier findings, many users noted that their routes could change unexpectedly. To address this, we explored using GPS to detect when a user deviates from their planned path and trigger a reminder for the intended trip.

Users shared that the app made planning their trips seamless and the fear of sleeping and missing their stops significantly went down. One quote from peer feedback was that “The Wake Up app feels really intuitive and with my sleep condition I can be guaranteed on not missing my stop.”

I learned that while i underestimated the scope of this project, the problem I was trying to solve was a big one, and could easily be made more complex. But diligently going through each step of the design process and aligning with specific user needs helped me come up with solutions that were simple, feasible and useful.