Ōura Ring Case Study

For quick reading, I’ve highlighted the important bits in each section

  1. Introduction

Oura describes itself as “an award-winning and fast-growing startup that helps people track all stages of sleep and activity using the Oura Ring and connected app. By providing daily feedback and practical steps to inspire healthy lifestyles, we've helped hundreds of thousands of people improve their sleep, understand their bodies, and transform their health.”

In this case study I will be analyzing Oura as a company and the Oura Ring app (which I have been using on and off for a couple of years), as well as walking through problems that I have identified with the app, the steps I would take to get more feedback, and potential solutions.

2. Understanding Ōura

I first wanted to understand Oura’s mission statement and how the company positions itself from a strategic point of view. These are a couple observations that stuck out to me from looking at their pages:

  • Mission statement: “We’re on a mission to empower every person to own their inner potential…”

  • 3 taglines that stuck out to me on their website: “Accuracy above all,” “Sleep, deciphered,” and “Perfect your sleep.”

  • Main functionality that the company advertises: Sleep, activity, and readiness

  • Emphasis on specific features that the technology enables: Heart rate monitoring, temperature sensors, etc.

  • Newly featured guided audio sessions, videos for meditation and rest

  • Advertised capability to help women track their cycles

Given these observations, I think we can conclude that the intended customer experience and bottom line for Oura are as follows:

  • Users have existing behaviors, exercise routines, sleep patterns, and external influences on their health

  • Users wear the Oura Ring during their day-to-day life

  • The Oura Ring collects data about important health metrics

  • Oura provide insights and tools to empower the user to improve their health by changing their habits

  • Users take those insights and modify their habits, which improves their health and wellness

  • These improvements reflect well on Oura and promotes word-of-mouth awareness and increased sales

3. High-Level Features

With these insights in mind, I’ll deep dive the app’s core features and functionality.

Sleep - Every morning, the app provides users with a set of metrics about the quality of their previous night of sleep, like a sleep score, information on various contributors like total sleep time, a visual timeline of wakefulness, and heart rate information.

Activity - Every day, the app provides users with a set of metrics about their level of activity from the current and previous days, like an activity score, information on various contributors like movement and number of steps.

Readiness - Every morning, the app provides users with a set of metrics about their level of readiness for the day ahead based on their previous night’s sleep, previous day’s activity and emergent patterns that it can detect about your recovery.

Tags - A feature in which you can add labels for any day to track activities (workouts, cold showers), diet, environmental factors, emotional state, etc.

Guided Audio Samples - Audio clips to be used for meditation exercises, non-sleep deep rest (NSDR), focus, sleep, etc.

4. Opportunity Focus

While I am mostly impressed with the accuracy and sheer volume of information that is produced from wearing the Oura ring, one aspect that I think is severely lacking is the usability of the information provided.

Oura’s mission statement highlights that their goal is to empower individuals to improve their health, but there is very little direction provided by the Oura ring app on how an individual can alter their behavior to improve their health. To explain, this has been an experience I’ve had many times as a user of the ring:

  • I go about my day to day life, keeping an eye on my metrics every morning to see how my sleep was the previous day, and maybe labeling my day with tags if something was note worthy (a meal or exercise routine that I did)

  • Let’s say my sleep scores have been relatively consistent

  • One day I wake up not refreshed at all and I look at the app to see a low sleep score… now what?

  • Maybe it was something I ate, something I did. Maybe I’m stressed from work. Maybe I went to bed too late or too early. Who’s to say?

“Well, that’s what tags are for. Just look at what you did yesterday and take steps to avoid those things.” You might say. But there are three problems with this:

  1. Inputting tags like workouts, meals, activities, etc. is unnecessarily annoying and time consuming.

  2. Any relationship between your habits (tags) and your health (sleep score, readiness score, etc.) is an analysis you have to do on your own! So, it’s nearly impossible to know what fixes need to be made to your habits.

  3. The app does not emphasize other important health factors such as the mood and energy level of the user (expanded on in section 6).

These are the main issues I will be attempting to solve for the rest of this case study - how can Oura improve its ease of use and provide more actionable insights into healthy habit forming.

5. Validation

Obviously, these problems I’ve identified are exactly one data point of feedback (from myself), and ideally I would try to obtain feedback from a larger number customers. There may be an opportunity to gain customer feedback from looking at reviews on the app store, or prompting them in the app about if they feel like they’ve been able to accomplish their goals over time.

However, my ideal situation would be to interview a number of customers who I feel capture all of the personas that the company has identified. This could be done by reaching out to customers on social media with an incentive for a subscription discount to encourage participation.

In terms of the interview itself, I’m specifically trying to answer the following questions:

  • How are users utilizing tags? Do they help users make decisions about their health?

  • What information do user find most useful in the app? The least useful?

  • Do users feel annoyed or discouraged by the process of tracking their sleep with Oura? What aspect is most frustrating?

  • Do users feel as though they are missing out on critical information by not accounting for their mood or alertness?

Additionally, I would align my questions and conduct with the following in mind:

  • These types of ‘validation’ interviews are particularly sensitive to bias, so I would try to not bring up my specific hypothesis until the end or ask leading questions

  • I would ask open ended questions, ask about their day and the context in which they use the Oura app

  • I would let them do most of the talking and see if they talk about the problems I identified on their own

6. Brainstorming Solutions

Inputting Tags

The first aspect I would like to address is the ease of use of the tag feature. If users are too frustrated to input data about their day then the overall value of the app is significantly diminished.

This is the current process (clicks in magenta):

I see a several problems with this design:

  1. Tags are hidden under multiple button clicks

  2. In the New Tag Entry page, the tags to choose from are organized in a huge list in alphabetical order, making it annoying to scroll and find the tag you want (or type one in manually)

  3. Adding a tag for a workout or meditation is separate from the everything else

  4. Tags in the list provided don’t follow a theme (it includes moods, environmental factors, diet, etc.)

  5. Some of the tags are completely unnecessary to include (e.g. how often is someone going to be giving birth while wearing the Oura ring and think to record this in the app?)

Personally, the thought process that I would have while entering tags would be: “Ok what did I eat today, let’s put that in. What about exercise? Supplements? Hydration? Work? What was my mood and energy level at today?”

 One potential solution to this is having a dedicated tab in the app for entering tags. This tab would consist of a categorized selection map as shown in the rough mockups below:

While the exact design I have shown still needs some improvement, an interface like this would encourage users to input a significant amount more information about their health and habits.

An additional feature to this could include the most frequently used tags by users to save time going through the map.

Inputting Mood & Alertness

Another feature that I think is lacking is that Oura doesn’t do a good job of tracking how you are actually feeling on a given day; it can take its best guess based on your readiness score and sleep score, but your mood and energy levels could be quite different from what Oura thinks it is. And since how you actually feel day-to-day is more important than a calculated score, it is important to measure.

Oura currently sends an alert every evening reminding you that your bedtime is approaching as an attempt to keep you on schedule. In addition to this, the app could send an alert prompting you to enter in a rating of your mood and alertness that you felt during the day.

There may also be an opportunity for this feature to be included in the selection map that I described above.

Advanced Analytics

The last functionality that I would like to see incorporated is one in which relationships are discovered between tags and Oura’s scores (including mood and alertness scores as described above). This is a mockup of a tab called “Insights” where users can view important insights about how their habits have been affecting their sleep, mood, etc.:

This tab provides specific, actionable insights into people’s habits. E.g. “Ok, let me try to take a week off of eating dairy since it seems to be affecting my sleep. Maybe I’m allergic.”

The above mockups display simple correlation analyses, but could hypothetically involve a machine learning model that finds trends between your inputs (food, exercise, etc.) and outputs (sleep, energy, mood).