Lanterns: Mindfulness Journaling

Interview findings gave us both the opportunity and the design constraints. Users described the existing lanterns experience as peaceful, and said they already felt less alone after writing one. But they wanted more – they wanted to know other people were out there.

At the same time, they were worried: worried about reading content that would deepen their anxiety, and worried about receiving harmful messages from strangers. The design problem was to connect people without exposing them.

Key insight from interviews
Users who sent lanterns publicly weren't doing it for themselves – they were doing it for other people too. They wanted to show someone else, somewhere else, that they weren't alone either.

The core design challenge was building a social layer for one of the most emotionally vulnerable moments of the day. We had to address bedtime anxiety without introducing the risks that make social media feel unsafe: judgment, comparison, harmful content, and the pressure to perform.

• Decision 01: Likes only, no comments
  Users can react with a heart but cannot reply or comment. This was a deliberate choice to create a space of pure support – no negativity is structurally possible.
• Decision 02: Full anonymity, public or private
  All lanterns are anonymous regardless of public/private mode. Public means others can read and react – but never know who wrote it. This removed the vulnerability barrier to sharing.
• Decision 03: Dark reds, no blue light
  The Wind Down space was designed in deep reds and warm tones to minimize blue light exposure – a deliberate sleep science decision embedded into the visual design itself.

• Decision 04: Wind Down separated from Sleep Mode
  CBT-I principles state the bed should be associated only with sleep. Separating Wind Down from Sleep Mode as distinct spaces reinforced this.
• Decision 05: Kado as emotional anchor
  Kado appears in the Wind Down space looking up at the lanterns floating above. When a lantern is released, a Rive animation plays of Kado reacting – making the act of letting go feel witnessed and affirmed.
• Decision 06: Dream Miles incentive
  Users earn 15 Dream Miles per lantern sent – tying the feature into the app's existing reward system and giving a concrete incentive for the wind-down habit.

After leading the design phase, I created the tech spec and wrote the engineering tickets for the sprint – translating the design decisions into a buildable spec that covered the Lanterns FTUE, write and read flows, public/private session switching, reaction mechanics, notification triggers, Sleep Log integration, and edge cases including what happens when no lanterns exist and how Kado's accelerometer-triggered behavior interacts with Wind Down Lanterns.

The UI was built with engineering complexity in mind from the start. Lantern shapes and animations were scoped to what our Rive animator could build within the sprint, and the interaction model – swipe to read, and tap to react – was kept deliberate and simple. No feature that required significant back-end complexity was included unless it was essential to the core emotional experience.

The Sleep Log was updated as part of the same sprint to surface lantern stats including views, reactions, and Dream Miles earned to give users a morning summary of the community support they'd received while asleep.

Writing the tech spec myself, after leading the design, meant there was no translation loss between design intent and engineering execution. The spec covered functionality details, edge cases, FTUE flows, notification copy, Dream Miles triggers, and Sleep Log updates in a single document the engineering team could build directly from.