A Mood Tracking and Journaling App
My Role
UX/UI Designer
Team
Developer
2 UX/UI Designers
Duration
3 weeks
My role in this group project was to;
Help with User Persona
Create User Survey
Help with User Interview Questions and Interviewing Process
Involve Brainstorming, Ideation and Come Up with Possible Features
Do the Competitor Analysis
Help with User Flow
Designing Journal and Mood Entry Pages, Monthly Charts, Drafts and Folders Screens
Iterate and Test the Prototype
OVERVIEW
Mood tracking is a positive psychology technique for improving mental health where a person records their mood, usually at set time intervals, in order to help identify patterns in how their mood varies.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Most people are not aware that understanding your moods helps you manage them and feel better faster. Journaling is an example of an expressive coping method, which is a technique that helps a person process negative thoughts, feelings, or experiences by releasing them. By putting these things on the page, they can have less power over you.
GOALS
Giving people the habit of mood tracking and journaling could help to manage their lifestyle choices, make informed health decisions, prevent or avoid triggers of negative moods, and work towards a better quality of life.
USER PERSONA
I helped creating the user persona after the problem statement.
USER TESTING
I conducted the User Survey and helped the team with the interview questions. I interviewed 4 people total of 12 people.
Research objectives and interview questions.
INTERVIEW RESULTS
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Chenelle
“I write a journal about once a week.”
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Lucy
“My struggle is not being organized and disciplined.”
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Matt
“I am not familiar with mood tracking.”
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Sabrina
“I do not normally journal because I sometimes forget where I write things”
EMPATHY MAP
To gain a quick understanding of our target users, we created Empathy Map.
Gains
Keeping track/journaling milestones and accomplishments
Being organized
Being disciplined
Pains
Not being consistent
Self-discipline
Lack of motivation to see progression
BRAINSTORMING AND IDEATION
Me and my team did brainstorming and came up with some features that would help our users with the pain points. Here are some ideas;
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I like;
Pushing notifications for a weekly journal
Taking photos of memorable moments
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I wish;
My journal could show me entries I made a year ago on the same day
You could transfer notes between apps.
You could tie goals/journals to a certain mood
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What If;
Being reminded to create consistency for your goals
An app that could allow me to add people to talk about mental health and self-growth
COMPETITOR ANALYSIS
I found that there are 2 direct, and 2 indirect competitors for journaling mood-tracking apps. Memento App and Vision Board were direct competitors. Daylio and Apple Notes App were indirect competitors.
We like the Memento App, which has a feature where you can go back in time and explore your past. We wanted our mood-tracking app to have this feature to show user the progression.
Daylio allows you to add your mood and activities for the day. This feature could help users to add mood and related activities to express their feelings.
Vision Board has customizations that help users to personalize their needs and preferences. We thought this feature could help users pick a color of the day to show their emotions related to their mood.
You can add photos to Apple Notes, and we thought this was a cool feature since most people like to immortalize memories by taking a photo of them. You could add a photo that reflects how you are feeling.
USER FLOW
I was responsible for creating/adding a journal and further steps, mood tracking entries, and further steps, folder, draft, and monthly chart for the user flow.
LO-FI PROTOTYPE
We rapidly created our lo-fi prototype and tested it.
USER TESTING NOTES
For the Lo-Fi prototype, we created a user testing script with some basic tasks for the user to try features we have integrated. Here are some feedbacks to iterate the Lo-Fi prototype in a more functional and useful direction;
“Save button on add journal page was confusing - seeing "save" and "cancel" would be easier.”
“It is still young but the idea is good and the Lo-Fi prototype is moving to a good direction.”
“Uploading photos button should be on the same page with journal entry.”
“A clear onboarding a must-have.”
HI-FI PROTOTYPE
We used the feedback from our user testing on the lo-fi prototype and iterated our final design. Here is the final prototype for Chronicle!
USER TESTING NOTES
“Coloring, branding and icons are all clear and there is simplicity about it.”
“Being able to see how your mood changes over a period of time is pretty awesome”
“I love the color choices, it makes me feel very calm”
“I like how the journal and mood folders are organized”
“It looks really inviting!”
“Flows well!”
CONCLUSION
Giving people tools to let them explore and describe their feelings is very important. Creating this app was a great experience to deep dive into human behavior and emotions, and understand the importance of why being able to recognize our feelings and moods is important. Once we can define and acknowledge our feelings and moods, we can have control of them. It was also a great experience working with my teammates.