MorpheUs
A solution to visualize your dreams.
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Timeframe
October 2021 - February 2022
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Role
User Research, UX and UI Design
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Team
A team of four UX/UI Designers
01. Challenge
Imagine waking up from an intense dream that has your curiosity piqued. Throughout the day, as you go about your routine, you can't help but wonder about the meaning and details of that dream. However, despite your attempts to hold onto the memory, important parts of the dream start slipping away, and before you know it, the once-vivid experience becomes a distant and fading recollection. The challenge you face is the common experience of forgetting crucial elements of your dreams as the day progresses, leaving you with only fragments or, in some instances, erasing the dream entirely from your memory.
Our design team looked at this problem and we asked ourselves how we could make sure that…
people don't forget their dreams anymore
are able to experience them more than once
could experience them in a whole new way
02. Solution
We created MorpheUs (No, unfortunately, I’m not talking about the guy from the Matrix.). In MorpheUs, users can capture their dreams and have access to them wherever and whenever. But the even cooler part is that through artificial intelligence, MorpheUs visualizes the user's dream in the form of a short video. MorpheUs is even able to analyze the dream and give the user feedback on recurring symbols and their meaning.
03. Competitor Analysis
Before we even started designing, we wanted to find out who our competitors were and what they might be lacking. We noticed that they all have features like writing down your dreams in the morning and storing them in the app or in the cloud. But what makes MorpheUs different is our artificial intelligence that visualizes the dreams and interprets them for the user. That's something that doesn't exist yet, which makes it our unique selling point.
04. Ideation
As we were a group of seven, there were a lot of different ideas that we felt we needed to scribble down first, so we did some crazy eights. All we knew at the time was that we wanted the user to document their dreams in order to visualize them. So the most recurring idea was obviously the dream tracking, but something that was also mentioned a lot was having a social media part within the app and having some kind of interaction with friends. The dream interpretation was an idea of mine, it wasn't a big part of our concept at the time. Then we summarised our ideas and immediately started wireframing in Figma.
05. User Research
To get to know our users and learn about their needs, we conducted interviews with 24 people of different genders, professions and cultural backgrounds. We then did some user testing and let them go through our wireframe. These were some of our key findings:
Our social media feature is not needed. We had to learn that not every app needs direct messaging, likes and followers. Fortunately, our user research reminded us of this. Most respondents just wanted the ability to share with their close friends via Whatsapp or other platforms.
On the other hand, dream interpretation is very much needed. Surprisingly, the interpretation part was much more important to our participants than we thought. This was a part of our research that helped us find out what we wanted MorpheUs to be and what our users wanted it to be.
Our Wireframe needs to be worked on. As most of our users would use MorpheUs right after waking up, the tracking needs to be much faster. We also learned that we need to rethink our navigation bar as the icon of the main feature is not as clear as it should be.
We have already built up our first small fandom. 75% of our respondents would like to use MorpheUs. 21% said they might use it, while I'm sure the end result would convince them to use it. In conclusion, people like MorpheUs and so do we.
06. Our Brand
Hey you!
Play me to go on a journey :)
After our user research, we learnt a lot about our target group and also realized that we still needed to learn about our brand and who we wanted to be. So we sat down and asked ourselves: "Who is MorpheUs and why is it needed?”. We realized that although we all dream, none of us could really grasp the concept of dreaming. MorpheUs could make a huge difference by ensuring that we don't forget our dreams since they are just a click away on our phones. And secondly, by helping us make sense of them. MorpheUs is like a funnel, it takes something so big and intangible and sums it up so we can grasp it and understand it. That's what we show in our onboarding, which is designed to help our users understand the concept and functionality of MorpheUs.
07. How Does MorpheUs Work?
Home
an everyday changing small quote about dreams and the meaning of them
access to the last dreams
Dream Capturing
documenting your dreams by typing them in or recording your voice
instantly getting a short clip
being able to edit your input by adding or deleting elements like colors, your emotions, the location and so on
saving your dream and also getting a lil aestetically pleasing confetti moment as a reward
Dream History
horizontal scrolling through a time line of dreams
being able to rewatch and edit all of your dreams at all times
08. Accessibility
For accessibility reasons, MorpheUs has a dark and a light mode. We don't want to scare our sleepy users with too much brightness right after they wake up, so MorpheUs is set to dark mode by default. But of course MorpheUs can be used at any time. If one of our users is on holiday enjoying the sun and wants to use MorpheUs after lunch, the dark mode might not be the best choice. This is why we also have a light mode, metaphorically designed as a lilac sunrise, as opposed to the dark mode, which uses the metaphor of a dark night.
09. The Result
10. What Did I Learn?
Iterate, iterate, iterate. In design, it’s always important to take a step back, rethink, test and move forward with the new findings. We probably spent eternities and eternities redesigning and rethinking MorpheUs based on user research, feedback from our lecturer and our fellow students.
There's no such thing as negative feedback. Even feedback that hurts your design heart is important because all constructive criticism leads to a better product. It makes you think and either change it for the better or you being able to elaborate why it should stay exactly like that. It's a win-win situation.
User research is sooo important. There is no UX design without user research. It's essential to know who your target audience is, what they want, what they need, and how that should affect your product. This knowledge will lead to a better user experience and an overall better product.
Design is a never-ending process. There are so many things that can be tweaked and improved.
MorpheUs definitely has the potential to be more playful and dreamy by adding more well-placed animations and illustrations within the app.
In the future, MorpheUs could not only interpret single dreams, but interpret and analyze them as a whole, and perhaps provide monthly feedback.
The user being able to personalize their short clips by uploading photos of their friends, their dog and their home. As a result, MorpheUs could integrate these elements into the short clips.
Personalization of Dreams