Musing Mood Tracking App
Problem
My group was tasked with the problem of creating a mood tracking app. Some of the questions we had to tackle were “How might we help people track their happiness?”, “what external factors may play a role in your overall wellness?”, “what do we track?”, and “how much data is too much data?”.
Goal
Our goal going into the design portion was to make an app that was simple to use. It was important to us that it was a good market fit with an intuitive ux design. Designing an app that would have an incentive for users to want to re open the app became a main focus.
Team and Role
Our team consisted of fellow UX designers Grace Havener and Melissa Peinado. iOS developers John Torres and Kyle Jennings. QA testers Jana Laney and Richard Alvarado. The UX team worked together on the research phase, user story mapping, card sorting, low fidelity wireframes, high fidelity wire frames and prototyping. Once we completed the high fidelity wire frames we handed it off to the iOS developers and QA testers.
Planning and Interviews
In the planning phase of the app we focused on simplicity. We discussed what we wanted to track and decided to make it as simple as possible. At the start of the planning phase we had a lot of factors we were going to track including amount of sleep the user received, diet, mood, and other factors. We wanted it to be around 4 pages max so we agreed that some of the features would be scratched once we were further along in the process. We downloaded a few of the most popular mood tracking apps and made a list of the pros and cons we found with the apps. Most of the pros came down to clean UI with a focus on one thing well. The cons we found on the popular apps were bad onboarding, no way to bring users back or incentivize their return, and simple features behind a paywall. Going forward we decided to interview a wide variety of people; we wrote up interview questions and decided to ask a variety of people from teenagers to parents to mental health professionals. The questions we asked during interviews are as follow
- What is your age, location, and job
- Are you familiar with any mood tracking apps?
- Have you tried a mood tracking application before? what did you like and dislike about it?
- If you haven’t what would you assume mood tracking apps do?
- What made you try mood apps?
- What are your thoughts about mood tracking apps?
- What are some self care methods you use?
- How comfortable are you about sharing your mood? Why or why not?
- Would you want to better understand your emotional habits and patterns?
- Why would you be interested in seeing how other people are feeling?
Survey
After completing the interview process we created a survey with similar questions and sent them out to social media, slack groups and design groups. After a couple of days we had a little over two hundred replies to pour over.
Results
Most of the people that took our survey were between the ages of 19–30 at 59%. 36% were between the ages of 31–50 and the other 5% were either under 18 or over 50. Out of the two hundred and nine responses only thirty seven people have tried mood tracking apps, out of those thirty seven responses only fourteen people found a mood tracking app that they enjoy. Even though most of our survey respondents have not tried a mood tracking app 27.8% of them actively journal.
When reminiscing I always think my bad moods lasted long, but it’s actually that I remember these moments more and take good mood and moments for granted. This way I try to improve this and be thankful for those good moments, since they are the majority of my life.
-Survey Respondent
Persona
After analyzing two hundred survey results and twelve in person interviews we developed our user persona with pros and cons. We narrowed it down to a female college student who needs an easy, fast way to track her moods. She enjoys journaling and is curious as to how others are feeling so she feels less alone about her emotions.
Strategy
To create an app that allows users to track their mood fast so to allow everyday use. The process of tracking their mood/journaling needs to be quick and easy. The app tracks your mood on a scale of one to five using emojis along with the main reason you were feeling this way. It also has an optional journaling section where users can expand on their thoughts and emotions. We also want users to be able to compare their mood to other app users anonymously by using filters for age, location, gender, and zodiac sign. This feature is designed for our persona and interviews which said that users are curious about other peoples mood but hesitant towards sharing their own mood.
Challenges
The biggest challenge we face was how we were going to display the user data on the trends page. We wanted three different categories that showed how the users felt that week, month, and year to date. At first we were going to display the users average and the group average for the trends page. We decide that average was not the best way to display for users since they could have 3 great days and 3 terrible days and it would say the user felt meh for the week. We felt like this was an inaccurate representation for tracking moods so we switched from using average and instead went with displaying the mood most often selected. If there was 2 moods that were selected an equal amount of times during the week, month, or year it would round up to the more positive choice We felt the most selected mood would be a more accurate method in displaying the data. For the group trends page we decided to keep average as the method of deciding what mood gets displayed. This is because it is drawing from a much bigger data pool and it isn’t directly tied to the user.
Structure
After making our persona we went about making a user story map to come up with ideas that might help address some of the problems our users might have and how our website could help them. After deciding what problems we would realistically be able to address we combined all of our ideas and established a minimum viable product. The high priority user tasks that we came up with are as follows:
- Get feelings/mood out
- Find patterns in mood/feelings
- See how others are feeling
Skeleton
Using our user story map and site map we began to build our lo-fi wireframes. We wanted to have a bottom navigation with no more than four options. To accomplish our high priority user tasks we decided the four options on the bottom nav would be a calendar, a new entry option, a trends option, and a settings option. This would give us a clean UI that wouldn’t clutter the screen with options. The calendar page would function as a homepage that would also keep track of your journal entries as well as view past entries. We decided that the new entry option should have 2 quick pages where you select your mood and why you were feeling this way then an optional journal entry section. The trends page would show you the mood and reason that you selected most often for the week, month, and year to date. The trend page also has an option for viewing group trends.
Design and Presentation
The calendar tab will be the main hub for the app. Entries that have been made show up as a highlighted box on the date they were logged. When viewing previous entries you can scroll through them or you can scroll through the months to look at past entries.
When moving from low fidelity wireframes into a high fidelity design we wanted to make sure to keep the style minimal and clean. Since we wanted users to be able to use the app everyday and log their mood we needed the process of making a new entry quick and easy.
For the trends page we wanted to show a summary of the users mood for the week, month, and year to date. The summary shows the icon of the mood and external factor that was selected most that week, month, or year. We wanted to show more than just the icons so we added an option to see the data in a graph format. We added a see graph option that would flip the card and display the graph. Since we also have an option to view group trends we added a large button at the top of the trends page so the user can switch over.
Features
Calendar and entries
New Entry Feature
Trends Feature
Conclusion
The original problems we were faced with when designing this app was “how might we help people track their happiness?”, “what external factors may play a role in your overall wellness?”, “what do we track?”, and “how much data is too much data?”. We dealt with these problems the following ways.
- designing an app that makes it easy for users to log mood entries and external factors that may contribute to their mood.
- tracked their most often selected mood and external factor and showed users a summary of their mood for the week, month, and year to date.
- Had users mood and external factors be shared with the user base anonymously so users could feel connected.
