Simplifying Long-Term Reflection For Mobile Mood Journalers
How We Feel (HWF) is a mood journaling app that teaches users to better understand their emotions. Its weekly review feature provides AI-generated summaries of weekly entries to help uncover users' emotional patterns.
Timeline
August - November 2025
Role
UX Designer & Researcher
Skills and Tools
UXD, UXR, Figma, Maze
Project Summary and Impact
I led and shared solo mixed-methods research with the product team behind an AI-powered mood journaling app I loved, influencing shipped information architecture changes!
I noticed that HWF's weekly reviews were getting buried with time, so I mapped the app's current IA, drafted an ideal user journey, and iteratively designed, prototyped, and shared new methods to retrieve and revisit them with HWF's product team. They confirmed the issue and shipped design improvements to address it so users can more easily observe their long-term emotional patterns!
Before (August 2025)
Previous Check In Tab
After (August 2026)
New Calendar Tab
"Calendar brings together your history and insights in one place, to better understand how you've been feeling over time."
How We Feel
Problem
Because weekly reviews are continuously buried under users' daily entries over time, users have two choices: fight growing friction to revisit them or passively lose long-term insights.
Because weekly reviews share an infinitely scrolling feed with users' journal entries, the more entries users log, the harder it becomes to revisit past reviews.
HWF's Check In Tab
The Weekly Review Feature
Solution
Preserve insights, reveal patterns, track growth, and uncover your values with friction-reducing archives that grow with you.
I designed a new insight saving feature, a user-built scalable insight archive and an automatic weekly review archive to allow users to better understand themselves through more accessible insights and weekly reviews.
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.
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.
The main takeaway? Accessible long-term insights encourage deeper reflection and more intentional living.
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 while maintaining visual consistency with HWF's brand
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.
Testing and 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...
Takeaways