Feel your emotions.

Feel your emotions.

Emotion diary app is a helpful tool designed to aid users in documenting their emotions and reflections, allowing for easy comparison and analysis to foster self-awareness and personal growth. By encouraging users to track their feelings over time, the app offers valuable insights to help individuals better comprehend themselves and their emotional patterns.

Ideation

The project idea originated from a deeply personal place within me.

Hailing from Taiwan, where the prevailing educational approach centers on rote memorization and exam excellence, I found myself at odds with this system. In many ways, I embodied the stereotypical image of a struggling student – a bit overweight, bespectacled, and lacking proficiency in various areas.
This led to frequent bouts of frustration, anger, and sadness, with a sense of helplessness pervading my interactions with others. Recognizing that countless teenagers encounter similar challenges, I felt compelled to create a tool.

This tool aims to provide a platform for individuals to articulate their innermost thoughts, uncover the underlying triggers of their emotions, and foster self-awareness. Moreover, it offers the ability to compare past experiences with present circumstances, enabling users to gauge their growth and progress over time.

The issue lies in the struggle that many individuals, like myself, encounter when confronting and grappling with our internal emotions and sentiments. We all yearn to comprehend the sources of our happiness, anger, or sorrow, as well as our responses following these emotional experiences. It is essential to explore the various elements influencing and mirroring our mood fluctuations. With this in mind, my objective is to offer users a comprehensive system that enables them to document, monitor, and gain insights into their emotions and the underlying triggers.

Enhance self-awareness by utilizing the app to diligently track your daily emotions and activities. By consistently monitoring and recording these aspects, you can gain valuable insights into your behavioral patterns and emotional well-being.

My approach:

- the ability to customize their own emotional color theme
- the data visualizations of their entries
- the auto notification of entries comparison when entering similar events
- customizable entry comparison feature for user to gain self-awareness

“How might we design an experience for users to understand their emotions and feelings?”

Includes: User Research, User Flows, Competitive Analysis, Sketches, Wireframes,
a Hi-Fidelity Prototype, and Usability Testing

  • The Team: Self direction, with feedback from alumni, professors and mentors

  • Tools: Figma, Miro, After Effects, ProCreate

  • Timeline:
    November : brainstorming & ideation
    December - January : research
    February - April : Prototyping, user testing and iteration

  • Target Users: Teenagers and people in their 20s.

Studying emotions and related materials broadened my insight into user experiences. I then focused on emotional design and self-awareness, crucial for users seeking self-understanding.

Research

Primary research
- user interviews & researcher interview

I had a chance to interview with Dr. Seulki Ku, who is teaching an Emotional Development course at NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development.
Insights from the interview:
- The explanation of emotions and feelings, leads to how feelings are more relevant to the events happening to users.
- How to design and create empathy for users who has negative emotions
- The usage of distractions

The Google form results are the results of my another project testing out how different people see and feel when they are view the same image. This gave me the idea of giving the users customizable feature of their emotion colors, because each person look at the same color differently. Red might mean angry for me, but might mean happy for another person. So, instead of giving just the default emotional colors, I am offering users the ability to customize their own emotional colors.

I also had the chance to interview a few other people about their journal writing habits and how do they deal with their emotions.

After I set my target idea to be focusing on emotional design, I started to research about emotions such as what emotion is, the psychology of emotion usage, self-awareness, etc. A few books and research helped me a lot:

  • Pieter Desmet - Designing Emotions

  • Harvard Business Review Press - Emotional Intelligence: Self-Awareness

  • Don Norman - Emotional Design

  • Lisa Feldman Barrett - How emotions are made

  • Marc Brackett - Permission to Feel

The competitive research on what apps out there has been done similar ideas, such as Time Caps, Daylio, EMMO, Mood Meter, Reporter, etc.
From the competitive research to see what I can offer the user than these apps couldn’t offer. Most of the existing apps have some decent UI designs and basic features such as diary entries, entries stats analysis and overview.

However, I found that they are lacking the opportunity to offering the user to compare entries so users can see the progress of their feelings.

Secondary research
- articles, books research, competitive analysis

The design of the persona based on user research. I’ve included red-green color blindness for the persona I created because I also want this app to have inclusive design and when I design for accessibility, I can include more users. In order to design for accessibility, I did many times of wireframing, usability testing and iterations.

Wireframes & low-fidelity prototype

User testing

I did a few user testing with professors, friends, and colleagues. Got some very great feedbacks. Special thanks to my professor Regine Gilbert for providing me a lot of great feedback and insights.

some user testing insights:

  • Some of the wordings are ambiguous

  • “I love the comparison feature, but I would like to see you take it to the next level.”

  • “The chart is a bit plain now. But I do like to see my stats.”

  • “Too many customization can be annoying.”

High-fidelity

prototype

Initial screens for new app users show account creation using various methods. Two screens depict emotions. UI prioritizes simplicity for minimal distractions.

Home screen &
new entry screens

When the Feel app detects a user has entered a similar feeling entry before, it will show a notification asking if the users would like to see their past entry to compare notes and factors. This is giving the user an opportunity to understand their behavioral changes from the past compared with now. What event happened before and what is happening now? What factors are causing these emotions and feelings? Offering this feature is aiming for users to create self-awareness and also understanding themselves better.

Users are given the option to customize emojis and colors in the settings to cater to their personal preferences. Different colors are known to evoke various meanings and emotions for different individuals. This particular feature not only allows users to tailor their experience but also plays a crucial role in enhancing their comfort when navigating the app. Moreover, ensuring accessibility for individuals with color blindness is fundamental for promoting inclusivity, while maintaining clear patterns aids in distinguishing between different elements effectively.