Experiements with emotions

Emobox -
concept app at UXstudio

Analyzing and understanding yourself is exciting. That's why when we found an old psychology test based on picking colors we decided to turn this visual experience into a new application. We explored some concepts and found that emoticons can work even better than colors.

We ended up designing a concept for an application that aims to track your feelings, give you an overview of your past and enable you to understand yourself better.

We started to explore the Lüscher psychology test, based on picking colors from a group. You pick the one that makes you feel the best when you look at them first, then you repeat the process with the remaining colors until none of them are left. As a result you get information about your existing situation, your stress sources, your restrained characteristics, your desired objective and your actual problem.

This is a pretty fun and interesting test because you don’t have to think too much: just intuitvely choose colors. You don’t have to deal with words, or definitions. And the result is surprisingly satisfying, giving feedback and helping you to think deeper about your feelings and problems.

Based on the Lüscher test we started to explore opportunities to combine feelings with colors. We wanted to help users understand their feelings in a structured way, so that it can become an everyday habit that aids understanding and triggers positive change.

First of all we created a paper prototype to see the decision making process of the users. What helps them? Colors? Words? Faces? Does it help if the user is presented as an avatar?

It turned out during the user tests that there are two ways of selecting a single emotional state:

1) picking: you select one right away

2) excluding: gradually eliminate the emotions that are not in play until only one remains

We also observed some interesting things like that some users like to organize the faces spatially before selection. The initial disorganization of faces was a bit confusing. We thought about presenting the faces in an organized manner. We also found that the spatial metaphor, that some emotions are closer to you than others, works. Users get it.

It was very interesting to see how they used the space around their virtual avatar. Some users pulled those emotions closer to the head that had some connection to their current emotional state. It also turned out that they have a tendency to pick more emotions, and even prioritize among them. Usually one is not enough to describe how they feel.

We created a digital prototype as well to see what happens if we group the emotions and the user has to go through a two steps choosing process.

In this framework it turned out that users prefer one step choices. When they saw the second screen with the list none of them were very happy about it. The users also seemed bored when choosing from a list.

Regarding the copywriting: the question “How do you feel today?” was quite confusing. The users often felt they should merge all their feelings from that day so far, which is not a simple task. The other question in the paper prototype test "How do you feel now?" worked better.

You can read more about the project and methods on formforthought

Back to other projects