nightnight.みんな (みんな is Japanese for "everyone") is a simple program that allows you to put your website to sleep at bedtime, encouraging your users to go to bed, better supporting their health, wellbeing, and happiness.
As technology creators we tend to build websites that delight, engage, inform, and optimize for profit. Unfortunately, sometimes the “success” of the experience can also hurt the people that use these websites, and negatively impact other aspects of their lives, like their finances, relationships, and health.
One of these negative impacts of websites is when their use gets in the way of people’s sleep. Sleep debt is a major problem in the western world, and has a lot of negative global health impacts. Helping others get enough sleep is one of the best things you can do to improve their quality of life!
By putting your website to sleep at bedtime with night night you can do your part to improve the lives of people that use your website. And by taking universal responsibility for the impact of your website on others, you are taking a small step to improve the world we live in.
night night allows your website to run normally throughout the day. Then, looking at the time on your website visitors computer, it will put the website to sleep at bedtime. The sleep page will also let users continue on to the site if they have something they just can’t wait for. Because night night takes into account the individuals user time, the site will work anywhere in the world and in any time zone.
Show me a demo
You can install night night by placing this single line of code just above the </body> tag on an html page. And that’s it! We’ll do the rest.
<script async src="https://code.nightnight.xn--q9jyb4c/js/2200/0600/nightnight.js"></script>
You can change the time that the website goes to sleep and wakes up adjusting the hours in the line of code above. In 24 hour time the first number is sleep and the second number is wake. So /2200/0600/ would go to sleep at 10pm and wake up at 6am.
Yes! If you’d like to self host the code, just follow the link to Github for the full JavaScript needed to run night night. night night is open source and distributed under the MIT Licence.
Get instructions for self hosting →When we don’t get enough sleep at night, this is called sleep debt. Sleep debt has a huge impact on our health, wellbeing, and happiness.
After just one night of missed sleep you perform cognitively as if intoxicated, and the cumulative impact over time is ugly.
One third of Americans don’t get enough sleep, and this lack of sleep is associated with increased stress and depression, hypertension, heart and kidney disease, motor vehicle accidents and suicide.
Learn more about sleep debt →Universal responsibility is the idea that as designers and technology creators we must take responsibility for ALL of the outcomes of our creations.
There is no limit to our liability. We have a responsibility to create great product experiences for people, but we also have a responsibility to care for their general wellbeing and health. We must care for them enough to help them step away from our product and get a good night’s sleep.
Universal responsibility is one of the approaches advocated by New Kind of Design.
Learn more about NKD →
Masamichi Souzou is a New Kind of Company, working to solve for human happiness through the consideration of everything.
At mmsz we want to know what the world would look like if we optimize everything, not for profit or growth, but for happiness. We are building that world.
Neeley Worldwide is a design consultancy based in London with expertise in Service Design, Speculative Design, Design Research, and Strategy.
We provide organizations with support through project research, design, and delivery including in-house webapp, iOS, and Android development.