Class/Client
New Media UI/UX
Design Tools
Figma, After Effects
Somnia - Sleep Data Visualization App
Somnia was a collaborative seven-week project created with Danielle Serocki for our New Media UI/UX course at Ringling College of Art and Design. The brief challenged us to explore how interactive design could help people better understand the science and lived experience of sleep through an engaging digital product.
In response, we designed Somnia as an immersive iPad experience that transforms complex sleep data into relatable human stories. By combining scientific insights with visual storytelling, the project helps users see how everyday factors like stress, light exposure, and routine shape the way they sleep, feel, and function each day.
Sleep isn’t just something we lose, it’s something that is quietly shaped by the way we live. Artificial light, constant digital stimulation, stress, and inconsistent routines can disrupt the circadian rhythms our bodies evolved around, affecting both the quality and depth of our sleep. While existing sleep tools can provide users with plenty of data, numbers and charts don’t always explain why someone slept poorly or what that sleep actually means. We saw an opportunity to make sleep science more human and to connect the data behind our sleep with the stories and everyday experiences that give it meaning.
Our solution was Somnia: an interactive experience built around the idea that sleep is both deeply personal and universally shared. Instead of presenting rest as a collection of isolated metrics, we created an environment where users can explore sleep through stories, scientific information, and their own patterns. At the center of the experience is the Landscape of Rest, a living, explorable space where users encounter sleep experiences across different ages and stages of life. A student, a new parent, and a shift worker may all experience sleep differently, but their stories reveal patterns that connect back to the user. This became the foundation for Somnia’s larger idea: even when sleep feels isolating, we are never the only ones experiencing it.
Somnia’s Sleep Cycle transforms the science of sleep into something users can see and explore. By breaking the night into light sleep, deep sleep, and REM, the experience reveals what the body and mind are doing during each stage and helps explain why different parts of the night affect how we feel the next day. Rather than overwhelming users with technical information, we focused on making the science approachable through visual storytelling. The goal was not simply to show users what happened while they slept, but to help them understand why it matters.
The Sleep Timeline takes this idea further by turning a single night into a visual story. Interruptions, stress, light exposure, and environmental factors are mapped across the night, allowing users to see how seemingly small disruptions can accumulate and ripple into the following day. This gave us an opportunity to turn something that normally feels invisible into something tangible. Instead of waking up tired and simply wondering why, users can begin to recognize the patterns and circumstances that may have shaped their night.
Understanding sleep is only useful if it can lead to meaningful change. Sleep Strategies translates the patterns users discover into practical, personalized suggestions based on the factors affecting their rest, from late-night phone use and inconsistent schedules to environmental stressors. The experience is intentionally focused on small, achievable changes rather than asking users to completely overhaul their routines. Somnia ultimately aims to make sleep feel less like a problem to solve and more like something to understand, reflect on, and gradually improve.
Working on Somnia taught us how much complexity can exist behind something as familiar as sleep. Over ten weeks, Danielle and I explored how research, data, storytelling, and interaction could work together to make an invisible experience feel tangible. The biggest challenge was finding the balance between communicating complex scientific information and keeping the experience approachable and human. Ultimately, Somnia became less about building another tool for tracking sleep and more about changing how people see their rest. By turning data into stories and individual experiences into something shared, we wanted to remind users that every night tells a story and that understanding yours can be the first step toward changing it.