Sleep Sounds
An Android app for sleep, meditation, and ASMR — with curated mixes and a builder that lets users layer over 100 sounds into their own composition.
A relaxation utility for adults aged 25+ who treat the body-mind connection as part of their routine — meditation, ambient sound, ASMR. Designed as the second product in a connected family of bedtime apps, sharing visual DNA and a component system with Night Clock. The UX challenge: turn one of the most generic categories on Play Store into a product people remember by name.
The second move in a planned product family.
This was the second project with the same Product Owner — directly after Night Clock. The bigger plan was to ship a family of bedtime apps that share a visual world and a component system, each one a focused MVP in its own category. Night Clock was the clock. Sleep Sounds was the audio. A third (Sleep Tracking) was on the roadmap.
The brief came in with the product hypothesis already shaped by the PO — meaning my work was concentrated on UX/UI depth: information architecture, the player surface, the sound-builder logic, and how everything connected back to Night Clock visually and structurally. Android-only by design, again — same audience overlap, same lower-friction launch path.
Stand out in one of the most generic categories on Play Store.
An oversaturated niche, an audience used to bare-bones sound apps, and the need to make a product that earns a place on the home screen instead of being uninstalled after the first night.
An oversaturated niche
Sleep and meditation apps are everywhere on Play Store — and most of them are either niche and feature-thin (a fixed sound library, nothing else) or buried under Calm-style production budgets. The opening was the middle: enough functionality to feel like a real tool, with a UI that didn't look like the dozens of clones around it.
Building a connected product family
Sleep Sounds wasn't standalone — it had to feel like part of the same world as Night Clock, sharing visual language, component logic, and accent identity. The constraint was a creative win: every component reused was time saved on production, but the product still had to read as its own thing, not as Night Clock with audio bolted on.
An audio-led UX
Most apps are visual — Sleep Sounds is audio first. The UX had to support behaviors a typical app doesn't: background playback, sleep-state interaction (eyes closed, phone face-down), real-time mixing, per-track volume control. The screen was almost a remote — not the product itself.
Reaching beyond the phone
Late in the project we noticed a pattern in user feedback: people often run sleep sounds through their TV in the background, not their phone. We pivoted part of the design to support this — adding looping ambient animations to the curated mixes, so the app makes sense on a TV screen across the room, not just on a phone next to the pillow.
Heavy on UX/UI, leveraged on a shared system.
Discovery & competitive analysis
I went through every relevant sleep, meditation, and ambient-sound app on the major stores — and used each one personally. The pattern was clear: most products in the category were either narrow and shallow (a fixed library, no mixing, no personalization) or premium and locked (Calm, Headspace — strong but priced out of the segment we were targeting).
Sleep Sounds had room to be the product in between: real functionality, real personalization, accessible monetization. The product hypothesis was unusual enough on its own — the design work was about making that hypothesis feel obvious to a user inside the first session.
Strategy alignment & ownership
The PO came in with a clear product vision. The agreement was that I would own the full UX architecture: information map, navigation logic, screen flow, behavior model. A connected visual story with Night Clock was a non-negotiable part of the brief — same visual DNA, same audience overlap, products that look like family members at a glance.
Visual identity & UI
Built directly on Night Clock's visual language — same dark nighttime atmosphere, same cyan-blue accent system, same typographic decisions, deliberately consistent. Where the products diverge, they diverge by function (Sleep Sounds has a player, mixer, library — Night Clock doesn't), but they read as one design world. The sound-builder was the single biggest custom UI work: over 100 individual sounds, per-track volume sliders, real-time mix preview, save-as-mix flow — all on a surface designed for thumb interaction in low light.
Design system & engineering handover
This is where the family approach paid off: the design system from Night Clock carried over directly. Many components were reused as-is, others extended for audio-specific interactions. The Android engineer was the same person — meaning the handover quality, naming conventions, and motion specs from Night Clock were already familiar. Less time on alignment, more on the parts that were genuinely new.
A shared design system means Sleep Sounds and Night Clock read as part of the same world — even though one is a clock and the other a player.
Three calls that shaped the product.
Onboarding and ASO as primary growth investments
In a saturated category, install-then-uninstall is the default failure mode. The audience tries 3–4 apps in a single evening and keeps maybe one. The store listing wins the install, the onboarding wins the keep.
I treated onboarding and App Store Optimization as a single growth surface, not two separate problems. The first-run flow was designed to deliver a real value moment within the first minute (play a curated mix, feel the audio quality, hear the difference). On the ASO side, I helped the PO scope and source a motion designer to produce the video preview for the store page — because in this category, a high-production-value preview moves install rate more than feature lists do.
A sound builder that respects depth without punishing simplicity
The instinct in mixing UIs is to either oversimplify (preset packs, no control) or to expose every parameter (DAW-style interfaces that intimidate casual users). Both fail this audience.
I designed the builder as a two-tier surface: curated mixes for users who want to tap-and-go, plus a layering system underneath that lets the curious go deeper — adding from a library of 100+ sounds, per-track volume control, save-as-personal-mix. The mix builder works as a remote control in the dark: large touch targets, no precision required, immediate audio feedback for every adjustment.
Curated entry, deep customization underneath — neither audience pays a tax to use the app.
Designing for the second screen — the television
Halfway through the project, user feedback flagged something we hadn't planned for: people were running ambient sounds through their TV, casting from their phone, using the room — not the device — as the listening space. The phone UI was suddenly secondary.
We added looping ambient animations to the curated mixes — so when the app is on a TV screen ten feet away, the visual is intentional, not a wasted black surface. The phone remains the controller, but the experience reframes around the room. Designing for where the product actually lives is more important than designing for where you expected it to live.
Second project. Stronger pattern.
- Positive feedback from the Product Owner and engineer on the design quality, the UX architecture, and the strategic input across the full project — from concept to ASO support.
- Reusable design system extended from Night Clock — accelerating development time and locking in visual consistency between the two products. The shared system became a long-term asset.
- Two more apps followed — LumiNap and Cleaner — over the next two years. The collaboration is still active in its fourth year.
- App discontinued from Google Play. The bedtime-app family strategy was reshaped, and Sleep Sounds was sunset along with Night Clock to focus on follow-up products.
What I'm taking forward.
A shared design system is leverage, not overhead.
Building Sleep Sounds on Night Clock's foundation cut the design timeline noticeably and gave the products a visual coherence neither would have had alone. The work invested in the first product's system paid back across every product that came after.
Watch where the product actually lives.
Mid-project user feedback revealed people were using the app through their TV, not their phone. That shift was the most important insight of the project — and it changed the visual direction in a way the original brief never would have suggested. The right use case is the one users show you, not the one you assumed.
Onboarding and ASO are one funnel, not two.
Designing the store preview, the install pitch, and the first-run experience as a single connected path — instead of three separate deliverables — is how saturated categories get won. Conversion isn't a phase. It's a continuous surface from first impression to second-day return.
Building a product family that's more than the sum of its apps.
Sleep Sounds taught me that the value of a connected product family compounds with every product added to it. The design system, the handover patterns, the partnership trust — all of it carries forward. The app itself was eventually retired. The system, the workflow, and the collaboration kept going into two more products and a fourth year.