Ability to add every entry context/event (I6, UX/UI idea #3)

[billiedemott]

Idea: ability to add to every entry context/event that caused the mood. See more details in the note

Additional comment: IPT (Interpersonal therapy method) focuses on reflecting back on the moods and more importantly on connecting moods to relationships with other people/events in your life with the purpose of understanding what events/stimuli cause the undesired mental condition.

Therefore for support of this method we need to have ability to add event to the mood entry. After a while user can see what moods are connected to what events. With filtering of user’s mood report for a week or a month the user should be able to see for example only negative end of moods and get summary of events that caused those - this should help them see trends in their life events and relationships with others that cause negative end of moods, same for positive. The system can even act in a suggestive manner, for example it can highlight your negative end of moods over month listing events and ask user “Are there any similarities you see between the events that cause more negative feelings? - discuss this with your therapist (call to action)”

Additional filters may suggest other interesting to think about patterns, e.g. if user filters the report to cases when he/she asked for “I need a cheer up” (see this idea in D7), they can see and analyze in what life events they usually need peer support and attention the most.

[billiedemott]

I think this is a great idea & an excellent application of IPT!

Distilling this idea into a short list: 1) Give users ability to add event/context to mood entry.

2) Give users ability to filter entries by when they asked for feedback from peers.

3) Use this ability to add events & filter entries by feedback wanted. Allow users to see if there are any similarities between events that caused more negative feelings & send this information to a therapist they are seeing.

Regarding 1 - adding an event to an entry. When would this happen in the process? After the entry or during the entry? Geolocation would make this step even easier to do (might be super expensive to develop though, we’d have to talk to Akshat about that). Do you have any interfaces that come to mind for this adding event/context functionality?

Regarding 2 – we could let users filter their entries by feedback requested, by color, by “been there” clicks (let’s call these clickbacks for ease of reference). Is there another category?

Regarding 3 – I think a link to this information should be presented when a user zooms out. When a user zooms out, they get the full picture – an overall view (“zoom out to get the full picture”). I think that motion of zooming out physically embodies the idea of stepping away or getting a little distance to be able to analyze & see patterns.

So, when a user zooms out, they can see the color block pattern & also see a link to see this analysis of events.

a) They should be able to send this info to their therapist from this view. b) They should also be able to get access to this info & send this to their therapist from a dropdown menu (in case they don’t understand that they can zoom out to see these patterns).

What do you think about that kind of IxD?

Baton back to you.

[theoxygenated]

Re: 1: The context entry should be available during the journal entry, but probably should be optional just to make sure that there is always a way to do a journal entry really fast (strip it of all optional info)

However, if this is optional - it might happen that people will skip it eventually making it impossible to derive meaningful data when comparing moods with events (IPT) So, maybe if this is optional we can have a mechanism that will nudge the user to add an event later. It probably doesn't make sense to ask user to remember the event more than 2 days after it, but I think it totally makes sense to display for the user his yesterday's and today's entries that don't have the event added and provide a quick text entry field for quickly adding some event.

This would be the same kind of nudge as many profiles do - when you login LinkedIn will always nudge you to complete your profile, add resume, etc.

This will allow users to throw in quick entries when they are on the go or at school for example, and then when they have more uninterrupted time and more attention span they can go ahead and add event where they're missing.

Well, another way would be just to make the field with event required. Let me know your thoughts, this is very important piece of info to collect from users to make IPT techniques possible so we should really try to get as many users as possible attach events to their moods.

How did you envision using geolocation for events, can you describe some use case?

As for UI examples, I'll check, just on the spot I can say that Facebook does it pretty well - when you for example add an image it asks where it was and with whom it was and it's quite easy to add it and it hugely benefits Facebook and allows it to make more interesting connections between data.

One more point: I think events might need to be private by default, I'm just imagining that if I know adding events will help me to analyze mood patterns I'll try to be diligent about details of the event. Details that I add very often would be sensitive - I wouldn't want anyone to know for example that I found out today that I gained 2 pounds and it made me sad. This kind of detail will of course help me to see how often I'm stressing out because of my weight, but this would be a totally private detail.

Re: 2: Filters - yes, so in total all available filters for the feed would be:

Set 1: ownership: All, your entries, entries from members you follow, Set 2: type: All, entries that need feedback, mood color, entries with most clickbacks

Re: 3: I think I have an idea for potential display of such analysis without leaving the analysis screen, I'll need to sketch it out before I can say that it will work.

Could you please share your vision on how sharing with therapist might work and would work off the site? E.g. is it ok for me as a patient to send anything to my therapist outside of therapy session? Would that be ok for therapists to receive random ramblings at random times from their patients? What a therapist be expected to do with them - immediately or otherwise?

One more point: I learned that there are probably no people who would not be interested in clicking on a plus or minus sign in the interfaces :) they always make people curious and willing to find out what those buttons do. So as long as those zoom options are big enough and well placed I don't think we'll have any problem with people learning about zooming.

[billiedemott]

1. Re context entry, I had a few questions. If a user adds a photo, isn’t that the same thing as adding context? When a user looks at that image, does it drum up the context & that moment more vividly than verbally adding the context with a particular event does? Also, I wonder if there always is an event to attach to a particular mood? Sometimes you just feel down for no particular reason. Can we use the image to make this IPT technique possible? If a user doesn’t add an image, should we implement the context feature then with a nudge? Should we offer users the ability to add an image after the fact to provide context visually? (FB UI clarified some of these questions, but didn’t totally dead them so I’ve kept them in my response – for future thinking.)

Can you give me some examples of context entries so I understand its use better?

(Re geolocation, say Xiawu was at the dining hall & she decided to make an entry about feeling worried about eating extra calories b/c she ate Cheerios. She might take a picture of those Cheerios, say “OH my god, I’m freaking out. I just at these cheerios for breakfast when I normally just eat an apple. Why is this making me so anxious. What can I do to stop this feeling? I’m so obsessed with being thin.” She posts this and then b/c she posts it from her mobile app which keeps track of her location using GPS, she also is able to add her location. So her entry is tagged with her location. I’d have to research more about geolocation & it’s ability to identify granular locations (it might just be able to show that Xiawu is on her college campus, not that she’s in the dining hall). This is more of brainstorm & not really a viable idea at this point, but I wanted to answer your question.)

Yes, I see this on FB. Very interesting. This actually makes a lot of sense now that I see this UI example. It wouldn’t necessarily be a duplication of what the photo does & it is easy enough to do. I guess I still just need to get a sense of what kind of info constitutes a context entry. The reason FB is so easy is b/c there’s a dropdown. What would our dropdown be of?

I’ll look into how some other sites do this. That’ll probably answer some questions too.

1. Re events being private, I totally agree! And great use of scenario to illustrate your point!
2. Re filters, this is extremely clear & well done. It answers parts of some questions I put issue into Issue #145. I’m thinking Set 2 makes more sense for the feed. Then if people want to go to specific members, they can go through their list of people they’re following, or click on a username in the feed. (What does this do to the issue of allowing users to filter the feed for their entries only? I still think users should be able to do that to manage their privacy. But perhaps this should be a separate link?)
3. Let’s table therapist-student interaction for now.
4. Re zooming, awesome! Do you have an article to share about that. I’m now super curious about where you learned this & wanna know more :).

[theoxygenated]

Quick comments not to forget to discuss:

• why context is necessary and if image replaces it: yes, image can bring vivid memories back and thats awesome if the image is very descriptive. However, image not always tells the story that preceded the mood shift, e.g. if I post an image of a rain puddle and I'm sad, there is literally never ending possibilities of what might have made me sad and the puddle in the image doesn't really help identifying it.

I think the context/event entry should stay, but we should re-formulate it to be more useful. Here is an idea:

When people have nightmares or weird dreams sometimes the psychologist would ask to write down last 3 emotions that these people are having directly before going to bed. This helps to make a connection between your unresolved feelings and metaphorical representation of them in a dream. So if we correlate this principle with our situation - instead of just recording the dreams (in our case a momentum with image), it's advised to also record last emotions that might have caused the dreams (in our case an event) So, perhaps it could become much more useful to ask users "what did you do before you got this mood?" (with better copy of course)

• filters: it might be enough to have just All entries and from members you follow filters. User's own entries will be accessible in his/her profile. Filtering by people who you follow is important - it narrows down all things to just the things you're interested in. You can of course see each person's feed by clicking through to their profile, but seems like a unified stream works best (I'm judging by Facebook, Twitter and platforms like Pinterest that all have options to see the stream only from those members to whom you're connected)
• zooming: I don't think I've seen any studies done about it, I learned about this from my own work and the topic coming up in discussions with other designers. And these kind of icons are already a convention, pretty much since Google maps started using zoom in/out