Journaling

Journaling is, of course, at the core of baseline. Let's jump right into the psychologically based decisions made surrounding journaling:

Psychological Considerations

(1) The primary purpose of this app is to journal. Every single click or page a user has to go through is another second where they might decide not to journal or put off figuring out how they're feeling. To combat this, baseline immediately opens to the journaling page when the app is opened.

(2) Now, to the journal writing page. You'll notice that when the app is opened, the first thing we present people with is an essentially blank page with a text box. Many mood logging apps ask people to first rate their mood, and then optionally write something about it afterwards. This approach has several problems. First of all, a mood score on its own is pretty useless to a user later down the line. They'll see that they rated themselves a certain way, and likely have no idea why -- so that log is pretty much useless if they're trying to reflect on what they're going through, which is a highly encouraged behavior. Thus, we want to put writing right up front and make it the primary part of mood logging. Additionally, the user is just gut selecting a mood with no reflection on how they really feel. When I used apps that asked me to rate first, I'd often rate myself, start writing, and then realize that my rating wasn't quite right and have to go back and adjust my rating. Since I had selected my rating first, though, I would often be a little more stuck on my original rating (a well-documented psychological effect), and I could even feel myself changing what I was writing to match my rating. This is just counterproductive. Finally, we don't want to influence how people are feeling with colors or other graphics -- so we've kept this page as minimal as possible.

(3) Once a user has written their journal, they'll see a circular slider for a mood rating that spins from -5 to 5. Now, most journaling apps will use words to describe moods: things like "Good", "Very Good", or "Bad". While this might seem more approachable than numbers, I've actually found it to be much worse. First, it forces users into socially defined boxes when defining their moods, with all of the issues that come with them. It's hard for some people to say they're feeling "Bad", especially if they've constantly been told that "someone out there has it worse". They might feel guilty putting that sort of descriptor on their mood. Branching off of that, these "boxes" can also bring unwanted stress into the mood logging process. For instance, I've heard from some people they can't decide whether they feel "Good" or "Very Good", and they're not really even sure what the difference is for themselves. Now, a mood logging app should certainly help a person distingush their spectrum of feelings, and I believe baseline does a good job at this. But it shouldn't be something that they have to deal with right out of the gate. Thus, baseline uses a more neutral number scale from -5 to 5 for mood rating to avoid these pitfalls. People can interpret these numbers however they want, building their own scale for their emotions (and in fact, I've anecdotally seen many different interpretations of the scale from different users!). The scale moves around 0, which can generally be seen as a neutral, middle-of-the-road number -- but beyond that, there's no assumptions about how quickly the numbers scale on either side of it, or even that 0 should be the "true average" for a person. I believe that this is not only stress relieving, but also empowering. Users can define their emotions for themselves, on their own scale, instead of fitting them into boxes that could've been defined for them, or ill-defined by themselves. This helps users make real progress in figuring their emotions out.

(4) After selecting a mood rating, baseline asks one final question: are you feeling at, below, or above average? This is there because of the -5 to 5 rating discussed earlier -- everyone can rate their mood on a different scale, so there's no way to know what people mean by the ratings they give. This final question allows us to standardize a user's mood scale. Currently, this is used for one measure: the baseline. A user's baseline is a measure of what they consider to be their "average" over time. Empirically, we've found that the baseline is a good measure of how "fun" of a life a user feels they're living. This is not a measure that a lot of people might recognize as important from the beginning, but it's a great indicator of much larger-scale shifts in a person's behavior. For instance, when I've lost significant social interaction, or I have a stressful period in my life, even if I don't really realize it, my baseline drops, and that serves as a reminder to me that I need to make an effort to bring more activities associated with high mood scores into my life (or watch my mood suffer as a result). (5) Additionally, mental health treatment is quite medicalized, and we believe more emphasis needs to be put on people just living good and happy lives without the need for clinical intervention. The baseline is specifically designed for that type of consideration.

(6) Photo/Screenshot Attachment is not necessarily a psychological consideration, but it's a feature a lot of mood logging platforms are missing. This feature was inspired by a time when I got a text from an ex, and I wanted to write about it. Since then, I've attached pictures of friends, profiles of dates, and more, and it's become a really important part of how I mood log about certain events in my life. We live in a visual world, and being able to have a photo that adds context makes journaling more personable, easier (less to write!) and, frankly, more enjoyable.

(7) We all go through hard times. But the hardest times can be really, really bad. As an app for people's deepest and most intimate thoughts, it's our duty to try to help the user when they're going through tough times, while protecting their privacy. When users submit a mood log with a score of -5, they are immediately shown an intervention screen. (The mood log submission is continued in the background in order to ensure the user is immediately shown the intervention screen, to avoid delays due to bad internet connections or otherwise.) This intervention screen urges the user to talk to someone about what they're going through -- either friends or professionals -- and provides links to psychological and financial help. This is the perfect time to intervene -- baseline is very much a point-in-time journaling system, and what people are logging is likely what they're feeling in the moment.

(8) Mood logs can't be deleted or edited. It's easy to get embarassed about how you feel after the fact. It's tempting to change your words to make them sound more agreeable, even if it's just to yourself. It's only natural. It's also not helpful when you're going back and trying to better understand how you feel. The only modification I'm considering to this is to allow users to submit addendums to their mood logs, so they can add anything they missed instead of adding a whole new box on the Summary page.

Implementation Notes

(4) A user's baseline is currently calculated with a sliding window (14 days) average on a user's mood ratings marked as "at average". Natually, the baseline isn't shown until a user has at least 14 days of data.

(6) Photos are self-hosted in Google Cloud.