Mello
Mood Reflection App
ROLE:
PRODUCT DESIGN
FOCUS:
UX/UI DESIGN
TIMELINE:
3 WEEKS
TOOLS:
FIGMA
about.
Originally created as a five-person university project, this mood-tracking app was designed to support students and young adults navigating recurring school, work, and personal stress. After revisiting the project independently, I saw an opportunity to move beyond simply recording emotions and redesign the experience around understanding them. I returned to our original research and usability findings to create a more focused product that connects how users feel with what is influencing them, how they respond, and what actually helps over time.
research.
As part of the original project, our team conducted four semi-structured interviews with students and working professionals to understand how stress appears in everyday life, how people currently cope, and their experiences with emotional reflection and mood tracking. Across participants, stress was often connected to specific contexts such as workload, exams, demanding jobs, and uncertainty, while journaling, social support, breaks, and personal boundaries were already being used to cope. Most participants had little experience with dedicated mood tracking, but expressed greater interest in understanding how their emotions changed over time and what contributed to those changes.
iteration.
For the redesign, I returned to the original interview data and re-synthesized it through an affinity map, grouping observations around sources of stress, coping behaviours, emotional awareness, what users wanted to understand, and expectations for a digital product. Five insights emerged: stress is contextual rather than isolated, users already have established ways of coping, reflection does not necessarily make emotional patterns visible, greater value comes from understanding change over time, and short-term relief may not mean the underlying stress has passed. These findings reframed the opportunity from tracking moods to helping users understand the relationship between their emotions, context, responses, and outcomes.
challenge.
I translated the research into a focused set of product features and redesigned the core experience around a simple loop: Check In → Respond → Check Back → Understand. Instead of treating mood tracking, journaling, goals, rewards, and analytics as separate features, the redesign connects each check-in to its context, the user’s response, and an optional follow-up that asks what changed and whether anything helped. I also revisited usability issues from the original group prototype, including an overloaded information hierarchy, disconnected features, and analytics that showed mood data without explaining its meaning, and used these findings to simplify the product around the behaviours most strongly supported by the research.
result.
The final experience guides users through lightweight, one-question-at-a-time check-ins that capture their mood, influences, and current response before optionally checking back later to understand what changed. Over time, these moments are transformed into insights that highlight recurring influences, when they tend to appear, and which responses have helped in similar situations before. Rather than rewarding positive emotions or simply visualizing mood scores, the final design focuses on helping users build a clearer understanding of their own patterns while keeping reflection flexible, supportive, and easy to return to.
