Designing towards absence
Designing the moment a phone gets put down, and the device that takes over.
Restful Escape for Hatch Sleep via Redscout
CONSUMER PRODUCT
CONNECTED HARDWARE
Summary
DESCRIPTION
A redesign of a connected sleep device and its companion app, structured around the daily transitions that hardware can hold better than any screen: winding down, falling asleep, and waking up.
THE PROBLEM
Engagement was healthy. The trouble was that every minute spent in the app was a minute the brand was selling people out of.
MY ROLE
UX/UI design strategy lead, brought in through Redscout for Hatch's brand and product refresh. Mobile app + connected hardware, working alongside Hatch's product, hardware, and engineering teams. ~4 months from strategy through shipped direction.
CLIENTS
Hatch Sleep, the connected sleep brand whose Restore device sits on millions of bedside tables. Strategy shipped as Restore 3.
OUTCOME
Forbes #1 sunrise alarm clock of 2026. TIME Best Inventions 2025. 83% of surveyed Hatch customers said their sleep improved (Hatch Sleep Wellness Impact survey, n=1,000, October 2023). The app moved from configuration tool to ambient companion.
PROJECT LENGTH
2 months.
Setup
THE PROBLEM
A sleep app competing with sleep.
Hatch's hardware could shape an entire bedtime environment, light, sound, gradients no phone could match. The app, though, was structured like every other wellness app: five taps to start a sound bath, five more to pair it with the right light. Each tap was a small re-engagement with the device the brand was supposedly helping the user stop using.
How do you design restful escape, a screen-based product whose job is to make you stop staring at it?
USERS
Hatch Sleep app and their users.
Hatch as a brand in a saturated wellness market. Calm, Headspace, Oura, every wearable. Most competed on features and content depth. Hatch's distinction was physical: a device that produced a full-room ambient experience no phone could replicate. Would the app amplify that, or dilute it?
The bedtime user. It is 10:47pm. The phone is on. The bedside lamp is too bright. There is one more decision between this person and sleep. "By the time I've set everything up, I'm awake again." The user had not come for control. They had come to be carried.
Features
Reorganizing content around daily moments
Content grouped by daily moments - unwind, sleep, and wake.
Limited edition seasonal content offered in group format.
The previous architecture organized content by type, sound and light as parallel libraries. The reorganization put the user's state first: unwind, sleep, sunrise alarm, morning boost. Each daily moment became a section. Inside each section, sound and light arrived already paired, with three curated alternatives if the user wanted nuance.
The visible result: the flow to play "rainy night sound bath with dimmed savannah light" went from eleven taps (across two tabs, with multiple scrolls) to six (one tab, one search, one selection). A ~45% reduction in the path from intent to ambient.
The Breathing Light
The hardware could produce smooth, precise brightness gradients with real fine-grained control. In the existing app, this capability was treated as ambiance.
The proposal was to use it as a breathing guide. The light rises as the user inhales and dims as they exhale. No instructions, no on-screen counters, no countdown. The body follows the rhythm of the room.
Box breathing Equal inhale, hold, exhale, hold (4-4-4-4). Used in athletic and clinical contexts.
4-7-8 breathing Four-count inhale, seven-count hold, eight-count exhale. Originally from pranayama, popularized clinically by Dr. Andrew Weil.
Physiological sigh A double inhale through the nose followed by a long exhale. Researched at Stanford as one of the fastest known voluntary methods of nervous system regulation.
Visual direction
From minimalist to intimate
While keeping the signature navy background, added monotone images to bring calmness into the UX.
Outcome
Restore 3, the device that shipped with the redesigned app and the Breathing Light, is now reviewed across Business Insider, Wired, The Spruce, and Forbes. What users actually do with the product changed shape after the redesign.
Where they used to open the app and start configuring, they now open it and start a routine. The app moved from interaction tool to ambient companion, and the hardware became the protagonist again.
Forbes
#1 sunrise alarm clock, 2026
TIME
Best Inventions, 2025
83%
of surveyed Hatch customers said their sleep improved (n=1,000, October 2023)
78%
said they enjoyed waking up more
11 taps → 6
a ~45% reduction in the bedtime setup flow, with curated pairings replacing manual configuration
Reflection
We finally landed on a direction: designing for sleep meant designing for absence.
Early on, the instinct was to create a distinctive app identity to survive in a competitive market and boost engagement. Fewer clicks, clearer hierarchy, better content discovery, all the usual moves. But most importantly, we came back to the purpose of the mobile app and hardware device: to help people reach a state of relaxation away from their phone.
Breathing Light is currently a discrete mode. Instead, it can become a property of any light experience (a sleep story, a sound bath, a meditation), not a separate menu item. The hardware supports it. Physical guidance toward relaxation away from the phone sound like next level relaxation agent behavior.
The Hatch survey numbers cover sleep broadly. The more interesting behavioral question is whether the Breathing Light is forming a habit or remaining a one-time curiosity. That distinction shapes what gets built next.
Perhaps live guided sessions, hosted by Hatch, could bring users together around their devices for a shared evening practice. The app's role is to set the time and start the sound and Breathing Light, then disappear.