iOS

What would make rest feel like progress?

Sleep Map

Sleep well tonight and a piece of the world becomes yours, spreading out from home.

Everything I've ever built rewards doing more. I wanted to know whether rest could feel like it counted, without turning sleep into one more thing to be good at.

Sleep Map screenshot
The pitch, in the app's own words, on the first night.

So in Sleep Map, sleeping well uncovers a piece of the world. It spreads outward from wherever home is, one night at a time.

You're not hitting a target — you're just slowly getting somewhere.

Sleep Map screenshot
Sleep Map screenshot
A hundred and fifty nights, and the ground they bought. Every entry is a place, and every place is somewhere real.

The hard part was restraint. Every instinct said add a score, add a nudge when you slip. There is a streak, but I made it impossible to lose — a bad night slows the map down, it never takes anything back.

Rest is the one place failure shouldn't be tracked, and holding that line was the whole design.

Sleep Map screenshot
Each place arrives with somebody who lived there. Eddie Dyer, Morgan City, Louisiana — one of seven children, and he won it all on his very first try.