Feel'in : A more human way to understand your emotions
A mood tracker that helps you understand the “why” behind how you feel.
Mobile App
Product Design
Emotional Wellbeing
Timeline
4 weeks
Hats worn
End-to-end Product Design (Research, Strategy and Interaction Design)
Client
Personal Project
Collaborators
Sole contributor
Tools Used
Overiew
Feel’in is designed to help people move beyond simply tracking their moods to understanding the patterns and triggers behind them. By making reflection lightweight and intuitive, the app supports users in building a more consistent relationship with their emotions.
Impact
User feedback indicated that Feel’in was “easier to come back to” than traditional journaling, as the low-friction experience made reflection feel lightweight rather than task-driven. This shift led to more consistent engagement over time.
Context
Mood tracking apps have been around for years. Most of them do one thing well — they make it easy to log how you're feeling. But somewhere between the daily check-in and the months of data collected, something gets lost.
Users know what they felt. They rarely understand why.
And without that understanding, the habit fades.
That gap between logging an emotion and making sense of it — is where Feel'in begins.
The Challenge
Existing mood apps help you record emotions — but they don't help you understand them. It's a solitary experience that slowly loses meaning. Without reflection, without connection, without insight — the habit fades and users drift away.
1 in 8
people globally live with a mental health disorder — yet most digital tools fail to keep them engaged.
3%
of mental health app users remain active after 30 days. Over half abandon within first week.
$7.5B
global mental wellness apps market in 2024, growing to $17.5B by 2030.
The Goal
To help users understand what they're feeling and why they're feeling that without making them feel isolated in their journey.
The Research
To understand how mood tracking fits into everyday behavior, I conducted in-depth and ad-hoc interviews with 20 participants actively using these apps in their daily lives.
I feel awkward opening up to strangers and talk about my emotions.
I always meant to journal but never did — writing felt like homework.
I find mood statistics so confusing — What am I supposed to do with it or how to use it to improve
I have always struggled to keep up with the constant mood logging
I find it challenging to keep up with tracking my emotions everyday because I just don't feel motivated enough.
Insights
These user insights helped shaped design direction for Feel'in highlighting all pain points and constraints for users.
01
Logging ≠ Understanding
Users could record how they felt but had no way to see why patterns kept recurring or what was triggering them.
02
Connection needs safety
People hesitated to reach out emotionally — not because they didn't want to, but because they didn't know if the moment was right.
03
Habit needs a hook
Solo journaling fades. Without shared experience or accountability, there's nothing pulling users back.
Competitor Analysis
The mood tracking space is crowded — but most apps are solving the same problem in the same way. Mapping the competitive landscape revealed a consistent pattern: where individual logging is universal, deeper capabilities like trigger tracking, emotional art, and social sharing remain largely absent. feel'in is designed to occupy the white space that every existing player has left open.
WIth these insights the question became clearer…
How might we
Design a mood-tracking experience that helps users move from surface-level logging to emotional understanding — while using social support and accountability to sustain the habit over time?
Design Principles
I instilled the design principles to help guide every design decision forward and act as a compass not constraints.
Emotion first, data second
The experience had to feel human before it could be useful. Every interaction was designed to honor the emotional moment first — the data it generates is a byproduct, not the goal.
Make the implicit, explicit
Most people sense patterns in how they feel — they just can't see them. feel'in's job wasn't to create new behaviour, it was to surface what was already there.
Accountability without pressure
Habit formation in emotional wellness can't rely on guilt or streaks. feel'in uses the presence of trusted people — not notifications or scores — as the reason to return. The accountability had to feel like care, not obligation.
Defining Solution
The answer to the problem wasn't a better logging tool — It was making the act of reflection feel as natural as the emotion itself, and make the habit worth sustaining through the support of people around you.
Feel'in is built around three ideas working together.
Layered emotion selection replaces the single-tap log with a gentle, conversational flow — surfacing not just what you feel, but what's underneath it.
Trigger pattern identification connects your entries over time, turning a collection of moments into a clearer picture of what's really driving your emotional state.
The Trust Circle brings the people you choose into your emotional world — not as an audience, but as quiet accountability.
Information Architecture
Designing for emotional wellness means designing for vulnerability - complexity is the fastest way to lose a user.
Before any UI decisions, I mapped the full system to give every interaction a clear home. The goal wasn't comprehensiveness. It was clarity.
Wireframes
After mapping the information architecture and analyzing competitor apps, I was able to outline the key components that would shape this emotion logging experience.
Final Design
Emotion carries color and color carries cultural meanings. Getting this right was one of the most nuanced design challenges of the project. The UI needed to feel calm and safe before it felt anything else, which led to a deliberate choice — a dark theme as the foundation, letting color become intentional signal rather than background noise.
From there, I built a functional prototype covering all core features, iterating through multiple rounds of user testing to validate and refine.
What happens next
Logging your emotion is just the beginning. Let's break it down what happens on the other end.
Your Trust Circle feels it too
The moment you record an entry, your Trust Circle is quietly notified. No pressure, no performance — just visibility. The people you've chosen can react to how you're feeling or reach out if the moment feels right. It turns a private act into a shared one, without making it public.
Feel'in connects the dots
Every entry you log becomes part of a longer conversation between you and the app. Over time, feel'in identifies the patterns in your emotional data — the recurring triggers, the times of day, the situations that keep showing up. Not to diagnose, but to help you see yourself more clearly.
Future Considerations
The emotional patterns we carry don't exist in isolation. They're shaped by how we sleep, how we work, how we're treated, and who we let in. The current version of feel'in scratches the surface of that complexity - and that's intentional. Trust has to be built before depth can be offered.
But here's where it goes next.
Wearable Integration
The trigger pattern feature is currently self-reported. Pairing it with heart rate or sleep data from a wearable would make patterns far more accurate.
Peer-Support Groups
This suggests a broader peer support layer. Anonymous sharing & shared experiences.
