Reducing Friction, Enabling Reflection
Designed scalable insight archives to support long-term reflection for mobile mood journalers.
Timeline
August - November 2025
Role
Solo Product Designer
Skills and Tools
UXD, UXR, Figma, Maze
In short…
I worked solo to better enable long-term reflection in a journaling app I love!
How We Feel (HWF) is a mood journaling app that teaches users to better understand their emotions and provides weekly AI-generated insights. As a HWF lover, I noticed these insights disappearing over time, so I worked to adjust the app’s IA, define a long-term user journey, and refine and concept test ideas for insight-preserving archives to encourage long-term reflection and support HWF's product strategy!
Background: Feature Breakdown and Product Strategy
Weekly reviews deliver on one of HWF's value propositions: emotional pattern spotting.
Weekly reviews summarize users' weekly check-ins into thematic, emotional insights.
~How We Feel
Problem
However, growing friction is causing users to lose insights, obscuring long-term patterns and progress.
Weekly reviews currently get buried under users’ daily entries in HWF's check in tab, hiding long-term themes and complicating insight retrieval.
Accessing last week's weekly review requires extended scrolling…
Solution Teaser
Reflect more deeply and see how you've grown with long-term insight-preserving archives!
I designed a weekly review insight saving feature and archives for past weekly reviews and saved insights! Let's see how and why :)
How might I allow users to more easily revisit, compare, and synthesize weekly review insights over time?
Secondary Research and the Ideal User Journey
Taking users from anxiety and depression to value-aligned living
Analyzing user reviews to uncover sentiments about long-term reflection revealed that users value how HWF's helped them better manage conditions like anxiety and depression.
The main takeaway? Accessible long-term insights encourage deeper reflection and more intentional living.
This curve depicts a HWF user’s journey over time and how easier access to long-term insights (e.g. past weekly reviews) reveals patterns and potentially life-defining needs and values.
Ideation, Information Architecture, and Wireframing
What if users could save and revisit weekly reviews?
HWF's Tools and Analyze tabs allow users to save in-app resources and analyze their emotions over time, respectively; both stuck out as suitable access points for weekly reviews, so I explored how saving insights and a new entry point fit into them!
Iterations - Saving Insights
Emphasizing user control and weekly review retrieval through leveraging HWF’s existing design
Saving entire reviews vs. specific insights and what saved insights should look like were key questions; I decided to let users save just desired insights while easily allowing them to return to entire reviews.
Iterations - Revisiting Weekly Reviews
Creating a discoverable, scalable home for weekly reviews
After initially designing a new weekly review entry point, I instead opted for a position-adjusted archive in the Analyze tab to improve discoverability, house weekly reviews, and decrease actions to access them.
Solution
Introducing friction-reducing, scalable libraries that help users preserve insights and reflect on patterns over time!
Allowing users to save and revisit weekly review insights while storing entire reviews enables deeper reflection and pattern spotting (e.g. progress, stagnation) paving the road to more intentional living!
Outcomes
Concept and usability testing participants were highly likely to adopt the new archives!
Evaluating the new archives taught me this: the weekly review archive felt fast and intuitive to participants, and they'd utilize saved insights to more easily view historical data and track long-term personal growth.
Success Metrics and Future Steps
Tracking engagement and encouraging continued reflection...
If How We Feel launched these conceptual features, I’d want to track saved insights, session durations within both libraries, and click through rates; I’d also explore push notifications and automatically displaying long-term weekly review themes to encourage deeper reflection!
Takeaways
