
Show HN: MoodTrack, a simple iPhone app to track your moods and thoughts - Harj
I've often wondered whether there are any patterns or cycles to my moods so I built a simple iPhone app that occasionally pings me to ask how I'm feeling on a scale of 1 - 10. I also note down what I'm thinking or doing at that moment and automatically grab my location. I use the data to show some basic statistics on how I've been feeling on average over the past three days, past week and since I started tracking. There's also a graph of my moods over time.<p>I'd love to get feedback on whether people would find something like this useful. I'm curious about what other things people would want to track about themselves and interesting things to do with the data.<p>http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/moodtrack/id541505268?mt=8
======
rjb
I have been wanting an app that does this for a VERY long time. Ever since
reading Letters From a Stoic and The Happiness Hypothesis, my life's
resolution has been to be happier than I was yesterday.

I, similar to codegeek, always envisioned something simpler. Just three
emoticons:

:( :| :)

Numbers may be more accurate, more quantitative, or what have you, but I think
this is about being honest with yourself and not allowing yourself off the
hook, "well, at least today was an 8". No. I want every day to be a 10!

Personally, I think trying to account for every emotion or mood possible would
defeat the goal.

------
raju
Looks good. Simple, and to the point. I would love to use it, but just a few
points

1\. The website link on iTunes is not up (<http://www.moodtrack.co/>)

2\. Is there a way for me to export the data out? Every other app that I use
consistently lets me do this (A good example is Dayta that exports a CSV file)
and it's absolutely essential for me to do it.

Good job. Hopefully you can answer the above two questions for me.

Thanks.

P.S - I already installed it, but I probably will just play with it till I
know I can get my data out.

~~~
Harj
Thanks for the feedback.

1\. Yep I'll put something up at that url soon, I just wanted to get this out
there asap.

2\. I absolutely plan on letting people export the data. I didn't include the
option in this first release because I first wanted to see whether anyone
would even use the app to input anything.

------
aaronpk
I would really love to use an app like this. The problem I have with most
things like this is that I have a hard time judging my mood on a 1-10 scale.
How do I know what a 7 vs and 8 means? And how do I make sure I evaluate my
mood on the the same scale day after day?

I would love to see a version of this with fewer choices for moods. Even just
three options like :( and :| and :) would be enough. At least then I would
know I'm getting more consistent measurements.

~~~
Harj
Thanks for the feedback, that's a good point and something I've become aware
of while using the app too.

Regarding knowing whether you're using the same scale day after day, how about
a relative scale? E.g. rather than giving an absolute "score" of how you're
feeling, you say whether you feel better, worse or the same as yesterday?

~~~
aaronpk
The relative scale is a really interesting idea! I'd love to give that a try!

------
laurenproctor
This is great, thanks for sharing. I've tried using daytum and askmeevery.com
to achieve similar QS tracking, but for some reason neither really resonated.

I think you've really hit on something with the push notifications. AskMeEvery
uses scheduling along with SMS and email to achieve something similar, but
ultimately their tracking wasn't as robust as I would have liked.

I agree with dchuk in that the real power here has to do with your ability to
turn raw data into true insights on trends and what affects a person's mood.

I saw you plan to make the data available to users over time. When you do so,
it might be cool to also add some kind of data analysis forum or outlet where
users can share the tools they've created to analyze their moods over time.

I'd also love to create custom categories or fields that I can check off so
that when the app pings me, I answer something like Overall Mood: ____
Food:_____ Idea: ____ or something to that effect. This could also work with
the tagging feature someone mentioned.

Thanks again for the share. I'm looking forward to getting my first ping and
putting this app to work.

------
aaronbrethorst
A couple notes from a friend of mine who tried it out:

* Let me track answers to these questions: How was your sleep last night? Quality and number of hours.

* Optional, user-configurable yes/no questions. For example, let me set up "did you take your meds?", "did you exercise?", "did you eat gluten/dairy/etc. in the last 24 hours?"

* The workflow around adding a note is not super-clear right now.

* you should be able to delete accidental entries

thanks!

~~~
Harj
Thank you!

I definitely want to track more things too, would like to do so without making
the app too complicated or feel like work.

That's really useful to know that adding a note isn't clear and I'll add
deleting entries to the next version.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
awesome, much obliged!

------
dchuk
this is wonderful, thanks for publishing this. I have a plan to launch
something somewhat similar to this one day and will test it on myself (as I
deal with severe depression) to see if it really does help things in the long
run.

Here's a few suggestions from my list of things I want to add to my idea:

-Allow me to add tags to my mood checkin. Over time, patterns will emerge for both positive and negative mindsets (hopefully)

-make the checkins randomly spaced out throughout the day so people don't just start ignoring the app after a while

-try and extrapolate some compound meaning from the data, something like "it seems when you don't get a lot of sleep then see this person, your mood drops"...can be tricky to do, but could really add to the long term value.

Good luck!

~~~
Harj
thanks for the suggestion, really appreciate it.

\- What kind of tags were you thinking? I've noticed myself starting to go in
the direction of tags via the notes I add when I'm tracking a mood.

\- Yep that's how notifications will work.

\- This is the hardest and most valuable part of working on something like
this. I'd love to make meaningful suggestions based on the data, am thinking
of the best way to do that.

~~~
dchuk
In terms of tags, my idea was to just allow people to drop any tag they want
in (similar to tagging a post in wordpress) and have the system autocomplete
their tags when they're typing. That way, if someone is constantly tagging
"mom" and their mood is low, after a while, you'll be able to positively
associate the tag and the moods.

In regards to your last bullet, yeah, compound insights are tricky. I still
don't really have a solid system of doing these, but essentially you want some
sort of rule-based system to pull it off. Please let me know if you find any
resources on it, I'd love to help you with what you're working on.

------
kyle_martin1
I also thought about writing an app like this a while back. Having the user
describe their mood with colors would also be a good way of describing mood.
Perhaps look into how psychologists evaluate moods and mood disorders. I'll
download it and good luck!

------
ColinHayhurst
Plenty of others working on this problem. These spring to mind as I've met
founders: <http://www.moodscope.com/login> <http://www.umotif.com/>
<http://moodpanda.com/>

I've also used mappiness (mentioned below) and found that the best. But after
6 weeks I was not learning anything new so stopped using it. This is a common
experience for people using these apps: As I've heard it at London QS meetups
(I'm a founding member).

Still awaiting an app that nails it. I'm giving it whirl. Good luck!

~~~
LondonEngland
Agree with this.

I measured my mood twice a day for 2 months using a similar app on Android. I
tracked 10 variables on a +/-10 point scale I think (excitement, contentment,
anxiety, etc.)

Turns out my mood just oscillates around a baseline of about 7/10 pretty much
irrespective of what's going on in my life.

It was an interesting experiment but I didn't see the point carrying on doing
it long term.

------
lewisgodowski
I've been interested in tracking my moods lately, so this is perfect timing. I
agree that I would find emoticons easier to use than a 1-10 scale. The way it
currently is, I find myself thinking too much about what each number means,
which in turn gets me thinking too much about my mood. I feel like this app
needs to be very "shallow" (for lack of a better word...?). It needs to be
engaging/personal enough to get people to answer truthfully/accurately, but
not so engaging that it causes users over think their mood. Just my $.02. Look
forward to testing this one out! (:

~~~
lewisgodowski
So after using it for 24 hours, a couple thoughts:

1) Allow users to go back and add a note to a previous day

2) Maybe allow users to customize how often MoodTrack pushes a notification
asking how the user is doing. (I'm thinking an option to choose 1, 2, 3 or 4
times per day)

3) I second the option to use a relative scale (how are you doing compared to
yesterday? - = +), as I'm still having trouble deciding if I'm a 7 or 8.

------
unohoo
One of my friends built this:
<http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mooed/id522311224?mt=8>

provides you with different types of moods - related to anger, excitement,
happiness etc. You can post the moods to Facebook as well as send your 'mooed'
via sms to friends. Its actually pretty cool

------
codegeek
Instead of having a scale of 1-10, why not use expressions like happy,
confused, sad, angry, excited, dull, bored etc ?

~~~
Harj
Thanks for the suggestion. It's something I thought about, I decided to use
numbers because I knew that unless the app was really simple I'd never use it
and picking a number seemed easier than selecting from a list of emotions. I
also thought it'd be easier to graph and run analysis on numbers than
emotions.

What do you think would be the best way to display the emotions? A grid of
emoticons?

~~~
alexdias
Personally, I think emotions would be more intuitive/easier to choose from
than numbers. However, the number of emotions to choose from would have to be
low (I'd say 4 or 5). I can see why you'd want to use numbers for analysis,
but you can assign a value to each emotion as well.

A list/grid of emoticons would be fine for displaying the options. Nike+ does
something similar to this when it gives you the option to say how you felt
during a workout.

------
pknight
Sounds very much like the experience sampling method used by Cszikszentmihalyi
who has worked on research into flow
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_sampling_method>

------
revorad
I used to track my mood using Google calendar email alerts and posterous. But
I gave up because it was too cumbersome.

This looks nice and easy. And for a change, I actually said yes to push
notifications!

------
Doches
Feels like a stripped-down version of
[Mappiness](<http://www.mappiness.org.uk/>) -- which isn't a bad thing,
really.

------
micheleharper
wow...I am so happy to read all of these comments! I just published Mood Pulse
<https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=moodpulse.com> and I am
thinking about taking the three moods (happy, just ok, sad) to nine choices.
reading all of your comments makes me wonder if this is a good move
considering that my initial goal was to have a very simple app to record the
user's mood over time.

