University of Michigan School of Information; 2012 Spring Semester SI-606 Personal Informatics Design; Semester-long project presentation

1. Mood Tagger
Caitlin Barta, Chithra Ramadoss, An Yang, Yi Zhou
April 11, 2012

2. ✤ Our Problem Area
✤ Difficult to realize why we feel how we do sometimes
✤ Hard to remember how one's moods have changed over time
✤ Motivations
✤ Desire to understand ourselves better
✤ Desire to understand how we grow over time
✤ Solution
✤ Give ability to track one's own emotions and moods

3. Process of Identification
✤ Research
✤ Survey with 63 responses
✤ 11 Interviews
✤ Design Processes
✤ Initial Sketches
✤ Lo-Fi Prototype
✤ Hi-Fi Prototype
✤ Design Evaluation
✤ Usability Testing

4. Major Research Findings
1. People want to see patterns in their behavior and feelings
2. People don't necessarily want to change themselves
3. Some want reminders but not all
4. Some were interested in social sharing

5. The Influencer Framework
Motivation Ability
✤ People interested in self-discovery ✤ Helpful for people with mood
Personal ✤ Past activities provide cues to elevate depressed
swings (i.e., depression, bipolar,
etc.)
moods
✤ Helpful to know where and/or
what the user did in the past with
Social ✤ N/A
others and how it impacted one’s
mood
✤ Incentive: People are interested in bringing ✤ Ability to record and report data
Structural about behavioral change and personal well-
being
easily by using different devices in
different context

6. Behavior Change Challenges
✤ Maintaining Motivation
✤ Time and energy are limited
✤ Need to keep people motivated to return
✤ Identifying the right moods
✤ Challenging when the emotion is 'neutral' or 'mixed'
✤ De-motivating data
✤ Dominance of negative data could de-motivate users from making entries
✤ Resistance to change
✤ Hard to translate ambiguous goals into concrete behavior
✤ Social Influence
✤ Can't control influence from friends and family

7. Direct the
Rider
✤ User-defined top 3-5 goals that
are emotions that user wants to
track
✤ Set default goals in the
absence of user defined goals
✤ User defined notifications and
reminders help users stay on
track and up-to-date
✤ Experience sampling
✤ Regular reminders
✤ Overdue reminders

8. Motivate the
Elephant
✤ Quick visual update on goal
tracking through calendar
visualization
✤ Emphasize personal changes
through treemap visualization
✤ Using visualizations to trigger
reflection about own behavior

9. Shape the Path
✤ Makes data collection simple
and flexible on-the-go
✤ Use PANAS emotions as
default tags

10. Initial Debated Designs
✤ Limiting journal entry length
✤ Contradictory: Some write for long periods, don't want to be limited
✤ Rejected unlimited length journal entries due to different use case
✤ Methods of tagging entries
✤ Originally tagged Twitter-style, within post
✤ Second iteration used emoticons
✤ Rejected due to lack of clarity
✤ Initial proposed visualizations
✤ Ex: Word cloud, line chart, custom visualizations
✤ Rejected due to complexity or ambiguous meaning

11. Initial Sketches

12. Lo-Fi Paper Prototype

13. Usability Testing
✤ Treemap based on emotion categories using emoticons is not clear
✤ Challenges with respect to ‘mixed’ or ‘neutral’ emotions
✤ Goal definition is ambiguous
✤ How do I aim to be happy?
✤ No easy way to view all entries

14. Hi-Fi Axure
Web Prototype
✤ Walkthrough of the live site
✤ Show how to make entry
✤ Show how to set up
notifications
✤ Show visualizations
✤ Hi-Fi Prototype

15. Future Plans
✤ Mobile app usable on the go
✤ Sync across devices, including desktops
✤ Social network integration

16. Thank you. Questions?

17. Image Attribution
✤ Point the way
✤ http://www.flickr.com/photos/prosser94/2790523291/
✤ Dancing Elephant
✤ http://meenakshisuri.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/dancing-
elephant1.jpg
✤ Trails in the rocks
✤ http://www.flickr.com/photos/ashlourey/5376873524/