It started as a to-do list and habit tracker

Journey wasn't conceived as a mood-tracking app. The original concept was a better to-do list — a habit tracker built to fit personal task management into daily routines. What research eventually made clear was that this wasn't a problem worth solving.

Research redirected the whole concept

The earliest surveys were written to validate a better to-do list. Instead, they killed the premise: over 50% of people I surveyed had abandoned a personal task-management app within two weeks, and nearly 80% had abandoned one within a month. Task management is a solved problem at work and an unwanted chore everywhere else. Follow-up surveys shifted the question — not "what tasks do you want to track," but "what about yourself are you actually curious about" — and the results pointed clearly toward mood, habits, and self-reflection instead of to-do items.

Interviews across a deliberately wide panel — psychologists, behavioral therapists, art therapists, project managers, educators, and other designers — confirmed the same thing from a different angle: people are curious about their own patterns, but the tools available to explore that curiosity were either clinical and inaccessible, or shallow wellness apps with nothing underneath them.

Every competitor used the same shallow model

I tested every mindfulness and mood-tracking app I could find on iOS and Android — guided meditations, soundscapes, wellness forums, mood journals — and mapped what each offered against how difficult it would be to build and how much value it actually gave a user. Almost none of them held up under that comparison. The ones with mood tracking used the same shallow model without exception: a slider between "good" and "bad," or some other binary stand-in for it.

The turning point came from literature, not app research. Without formal training in psychiatry, I turned to people who had it: the Dalai Lama and the Paul Ekman Group's Atlas of Emotions, and — the actual breakthrough — Robert Plutchik's wheel of emotions, which maps eight primary emotions and their intensities instead of collapsing feeling into a single positive/negative axis. Nothing in the apps I'd tested came close to that model. It became the backbone of Journey's entire mood-logging feature.

A click-through prototype, tested repeatedly

I built a full click-through prototype in InVision and ran it through several rounds of testing with a few dozen testers, tweaking and iterating after each round. I deliberately varied how much guidance testers received going in — sometimes a specific set of tasks, sometimes none at all — to see how intuitive the interface was without being told what to do. The mood-logging flow, using the circular target, was consistently the fastest and least confusing part of the whole prototype to navigate, which was the clearest validation that the design decision behind it was the right one.

Where it stands

Journey never shipped. It stayed a Sketch-based, click-through InVision prototype — validated with real testers, never built as production software. That's an honest limitation of this case study, not one I'm interested in dressing up.

Real-world validation, unprompted

What's kept this idea alive well past a portfolio project is a specific, repeated response: more than one psychologist I've shown this to, in casual conversation and years apart, has told me directly that they wish it were a real, working app they could point clients to. That's not feedback I solicited or a metric I'm inflating — it's the exact audience the Plutchik-based model was built to serve, independently arriving at the same conclusion.

The rebuild: stripped down, and native

The plan is a focused native app for iOS and Android, cut back to just the emotion log — the part of the original scope that actually earned that reaction. Activities, goals, and affirmations were reasonable additions for a portfolio piece meant to show range; they're not what makes this idea worth building for real. What the rebuild adds instead is depth on the one feature that matters: three ways to view the same underlying data, at three different scales of self-knowledge.

Calendar heatmap — the macro view. The shape of your emotional life across weeks and months, each day colored by its dominant logged emotion, drawn from the Plutchik palette. Patterns emerge on sight: a whole blue-gray week of Sadness, a streak of yellow Joy. GitHub's contribution graph, but for your inner life.

Chronological timeline — the micro view. Scrollable and intimate, each entry its own moment: dominant emotion, intensity, tags, note. Journal-like, and the one that feels most personal.

Aggregate Plutchik wheel — the existential view. Every logged entry over a selected period — a week, a month, a year — collapsed back onto the wheel that generated them, weighted by frequency and intensity, showing your emotional center of gravity. Nobody else is building this view. It's the one a therapist would actually use with a client.

Three views, one dataset, a single toggle between them — different scales of self-knowledge drawn from the same raw material.